Unintelligible

A writer really has only one job: to make sense of.

Make sense of what the expert has said, what the figures reveal, what the confused plot line allows to play out.

Make sense of it for the reader in a way that speaks to them as if they were the only one in the world who could understand the message.

Do it long enough and eventually you come to see everything through this lens—everything is a matter of making sense. Life itself, as lived by the writer, becomes a transposition of the long-form mess into neat chapters, clearly headed, climax and denouement, the epilogue, the afterword.

But this is a cruel deceit, because life is rarely sensible. It won't always fit the narrative, the chapter sequence, the page count. Sense won't always be made.

And at those times the writer is lost. The person singularly charged with saying things the right way cannot even begin to decipher events, let alone unravel meaning or decouple cause from effect. Nailing down the message is impossible; reformulating it in a digestible way seems like some remnant from a dream. The more the writer looks at things, the more incommunicable they become. Slowly, hope derails, the words begin to melt into concepts, and sense joins the realms of fantasy.

Still the writer keeps trying, keeps looking, keeps frowning at the page.

And still, whatever the meaning is, it remains unintelligible.