A couple of Thursday Writers* ago, my co-facilitator, Steve Montgomery gave us writers this prompt: “We fell in love again.” It’s taken from a poem by Ted Kooser, the first US Poet Laureate.

The idea of Thursday Writers is to write to the prompt, writing practice style—that is, go where the prompt takes you, write for a given amount of time (in this case, thirteen minutes) and when time’s up, read your writing aloud if you want to; no critique is given.

This is what I wrote from the prompt (some light editing for grammar, punctuation, etc):

We fell in love again, my memoir and I. We’d been a couple for a couple of years, but you know how it is with these things—someone gets a little bored (or boring), someone else stops coming home at night. Fingers get tired, pages get limp. Still we remained faithful for the most part. OK, so maybe I had a couple of quickies—you know, flashes that come and go. I took up with poetry for awhile, but it wasn’t serious.

The memoir, meanwhile, brought up more and more irrelevant scenes—a time in Dubrovnik that was really more imagination than fact—and kept wanting to go on and on about sunsets.

“Not another damn sunset,” I said when, once again, we were on a beach looking into the sea, sighing about past romances.

Personally, I wanted to stay in Budapest for while with Kati Mati, that stranger-at-the-crossroads wild woman I’d met. But there was memoir, putting us on another train.

At one point, during an off again of our on-again/off-again affair, I was feeling pretty bad, like it was really more my fault than the memoir’s. So I thought a change of scene would do us good.

I packed up all the notebooks, the files and photos and marked-up drafts from our writing group, cleared off a table next to my day-job desk, and set up the laptop with the Scrivener files. I dug out an old bulletin board and posted some photos. I made a mock-up of what I thought our cover might look like when we finally got to print. I even created a special candle, and collaged it with images from our old passport, and maps and pages torn from journals I’d kept.

Then, one morning not too long ago, I lit the special candle I’d made, booted up the laptop, and opened the Scrivener file.

“Honey,” I said, “do you still want to be with me? Do you still—“ and I choked up a little — “do you still love me?”

The cursor started blinking as if to say, “Yes, yes, I do. Yes.”

And just like that, we fell in love again.

—The End—

*Thursday Writers is a weekly drop-in writing practice group that I started in 1994 at The Writing Center, the precursor to San Diego Writers, Ink. We’ve been running ever since, with only a brief break in the early 2000s, and have been meeting at Lestat’s West, a performance venue of Lestat’s Coffeehouse in the Normal Heights neighborhood of San Diego for over fourteen years. Since March, when the “stay-at-home” directive was given in response to the corona virus, we’ve been meeting virtually. Still every Thursday from 5-6 pm and open to any writer who wants to join us. You can find out more about Thursday Writers here, follow us on our Facebook page, and sign up to receive information about our virtual meetings at Thursdaywriters@gmail.com