The angle that the ceiling of my bedroom makes with the wall is almost but not quite exactly the same as the angle of my elbow when I get stuck on a sentence and lean down against my desk to think. If you can understand this, you can understand everything. 

There are the same whispers between the floorboards as between the tree-trunks taken down to make them. There is the same buzzing in the honey-colored emergency-lights on the construction-site after midnight as the honey-buzzing hives on the hilltops where I used to go hiking with my father as a kid, and I still have to cover my ears when I pass the diggers and cement mixers or they will sting me or go burrowing into my head. 

Writing, as all art, is about gaps. Gaps in the ordinary. Gaps between things. Gaps between gaps. Gaps between people– widening them, closing them. I sit at my desk and I bend my elbow a little differently so that it becomes almost but not quite exactly the same angle as the turn off of the street where I grew up onto the main road of town, and I’m not stuck anymore.