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I was going to write a short essay on friendship and time.

As I was finishing up a two-hour phone call recently, a friend apologized for the time we had spent. With the naïve condescension of a teacher, I replied that time is not kept in conversations between friends. Or something like that.

It came out kind of silly. But it’s stayed in mind.

Over the hours between then and now, I thought I might sit down and write about the concept.

How the seconds stall and the awkward minutes limp by during small talk. How so many interactions have a silent clock ticking away in the background. How our Western workdays are taskmastered by the pharaoh of time. How time is a fascinating element, both graciously grounded in natural rhythms and silently shaped by cultural forces. Yet… how friendship buries the clock, carving out ethereal, timeless spaces amidst a clocked world.

That final observation was the main one, the one I intended to explore.

In my mind, it was magic.

I think it still is.

But when my eight fingertips touched the keys, my angled thumbs rested on the space bar, and my wrists felt the cool polished laptop metal, there was nothing. Just an idea. An idea that I could feel, but not one I could say.

This is writing. Magic in the observation and experience. Magic in the mind and emotions. Magic in the pre-verbal ideas. Then death, the nearer pen gets to paper.

Writing is a cemetery for magical ideas.

Writing is where the unexpressed wakes up to its inexpressibility.

The only hope is that on the other side of death might be a resurrection. That the magic of inexpressible reality might crawl its first few hundred yards, then rise in the dark valley and begin limping toward an untimed dawn. That some how, some way, I might come to say the unsayable.

Writing is where the unexpressed wakes up to its inexpressibility — then inexplicably forges ahead.

Magic. Death. Magic. This is writing.