on the tip of my tongue

All I want to do is write. Painfully, desperately, hopelessly. I feel my fingertips twitching for pencil or keyboard. My brain is constantly on the brink of the greatest idea the world has ever known, like an excellent thought just on the tip of your tongue. I could write a novel if only I could come up with the idea.

SaraLee Speller headed north that day. She was unsure of what exactly lay "north", but she knew that it was a direction she very infrequently traveled, as work was to the west and her social life generally lay to the east, and her parents were oriented in a more southerly direction. North was the direction that called her that auspicious day.


It was not an auspicious day for any particularly outstanding reason. She had woken up at 7:02, brushed her teeth, and ambled down the hallway to the kitchen, where she poured bland cereal and milk into a bowl and arranged four strawberries on a small paper plate. Shortly after that she showered, dressed simply, and left the house. As SaraLee drove down the highway, a song came on the radio that she hadn't heard in years and that she particularly enjoyed. She began to dance all by herself in the car, singing louder and louder until she became determined to vocally overpower the actual singer. In the midst of her personal dance session, she forgot the highway she was already on, mistaking it for the next highway, and took the exit going in the direction the exit off of the next highway would go. In short, she lost her place.


This geographical misstep led her north, a direction she hadn't traveled in quite some time. It took her a moment to notice her mistake, and by that time the song had ended and she had already passed two exits that would have taken her right back in the other direction, safely south, toward her actual destination. It took her another three exits and yet another song to realize that she didn't want to correct herself today. Today, SaraLee wanted to mess up.


It wasn't that work was difficult or tedious or even tiresome: she enjoyed her work well enough, and she was good at it. It wasn't that her life was unpleasant, though a romantic interest would have perhaps added a bit more to the picture. It wasn't even that she felt confined or jailed or whatever people usually say by her comforting routine.


The simple fact was that SaraLee wanted to make a mistake and watch with a curious eye to see where it carried her. She very rarely made mistakes, and when she did, it was something like buying the French blend of name brand coffee grounds instead of the House blend, or using waterproof mascara when she meant to use regular (which was really more of a pain than anything, because waterproof mascara is absolutely bomb-proof and makes a nighttime face-washing regimen much more time-consuming than need be). These mistakes had an easy fix; they didn't particularly disrupt the flow of a routine day.


Driving until water or country boundaries stopped her, however, was not quite as easily resolved. What would she do without her orange toothbrush, her clothes, her facial moisturizing cream? She didn't know. It wasn't really important. She wanted to see what lay to the north. 


Whoa... okay. So my original goal was just to spit out a couple one-liners for possible story starters. Maybe strike gold with a possibility. Gold is pocket change compared to the ideas I have with this, the amount I wrote! I struck a precious gem mine! It's raining rubies and sapphires.

Maybe this is that novel. Maybe this was the idea on the tip of my tongue.