ruminate

ru·mi·nate /ˈrü-mə-ˌnāt/ verb

to go over in the mind repeatedly and often casually or slowly.
to chew repeatedly for an extended period.

At night she dreamed of composing her magnum opus.

When she opened her eyes, she prepared herself for another day of disappointment.

She just needed to write. That’s all there was to it, really. Pen to paper. Heck, fingerpainting out words in the sand would do the trick. As long as they formed coherent sentences, and those sentences paraded into a story—that’s what she needed.

And yet.

It was easier said than done. Literally.

With the paper shortages, with the mandate to limit the use of writing utensils, heck, even the ban on sand—all these new rules and regulations made it oh so difficult to write anything down, least of which the stories that swirled in her head. What started as a waltz had morphed into a tornado, and she had no way of taming the beast.

Except speaking. Oral tradition, the oldest form of storytelling. That’s what people did these days, right? With the lack of physical materials, everything was spoken, transient. Sure, oral storytelling wasn’t transient, blah blah blah, tales have been passed through time ad nauseum. But she didn’t want to risk it. And even more than that, it didn’t scratch the same itch.

It was about getting to read back over her words. It was about finding a slip of the tongue that just perfectly matched her mood and saving it for posterity. In a story bigger than life, grander than grand—that is what she yearned to make. To write.

She knew that the world she lived in was pretty much a fantastical story in and of itself. The nasty kind of fantastical. The kind of story in the books she’d read as a child. Genre: Dystopian. Quality of Life: Bad. Possibility that she was the Chosen One: Slipping through her fingers day by day without a pencil in hand.

That’s why she wanted to write about beauty. About creativity and freedom and self-expression. Lovely things and happy things and a world where the “Dys” was replaced with a “U”. Those were the stories in her head. She wanted to imagine it, and she wanted to write it down and hug it close and read and reread and re-reread until her eyes glazed over and she fell asleep.

She dreamed about it, for what it was worth. But if she could just write these stories down to share them, she told herself, she could change the world.

Right now she didn’t even feel up for changing out of her pajamas.

But duty called—mandatory factory medical check-in to clear her for another quarter of pushing a button so the AI robots could do the pie-in-the-sky thinking.

Did she really have to go in? Answer: If she wanted to eat, then yes.

Sometimes she wondered if eating was even worth it anymore, if she couldn’t write down the worlds in her head. But she had to remind herself it was worth it—would all be worth it—if she could just hold onto the thoughts and ideas canvasing her brain, careening through her mind, so that one day—someday—she’d stumble across a paper and prick her finger to write with her own blood if she bloody well had to.

It had to be worth it. The wait had to be worth it. It just had to be.