#100

On the equinox, the day and the night are of equal length. A perfect balance of what came before and what’s to come. Two hundred and eighty two days before, when the nights were much longer than the days, she had the idea that she was ready.

Everything she had read in preparation said the same thing:

The only way to do it is to do it.

The only way to do it well is to do it often.

Don’t think. Just do.

One hundred stories before a full year passed. This is what she would do.

And so she began with story # 1. (To title them meant to think, and she was here to do, not to think.) Life would provide the material. Stories as plentiful and reliable as pigeons in the city. All she had to do was observe and write. The stories came in drips and drabs. a few a week, some more readily than others. She tried to share them, to make them available so that she wasn’t writing in a vacuum. But who read them wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing was the doing. The most important thing was the work.

Then, sometime after #58, the world she was writing in shattered to bits. Had there been a floor, there would be a need for a large broom and dustpan. Had there been a mirror, there would have been seven years bad luck seven times over. But there was no floor and there was no mirror and the pigeons had seemingly all but flown away. There was nothing left now but the writing. The work of writing.

Every day. She could forget to sleep. She could forget to eat. But she could write to survive til the next morning. And so, word by word, story by story, she built a new foundation. She filled in the cracks. She made it level. She made sure to leave room for growth.

Every day. Every day until she woke up on the equinox and found herself in a new home. A home all to herself. Safe and clean and stable and new. And she was stunned because it worked! The work had worked. One hundred stories. She had kept her promise, and so had the words.

And so, when the day turned to night, she turned off the lights, opened the curtains, and began to observe the world outside once again. It was all there for her, plentiful and reliable as pigeons in the city.