A week ago, during my despair-y day, I had that sentence pop into my head. I wrote it into that day's zero draft, then turned and wrote it on my whiteboard. At the time, it was a howl, of futility and frustration.
I kept seeing it there on the board. It had an insistence about it. As my mood improved over the days, it came to be a mystery, a puzzle. It evoked not a deep truth about myself, which is how it felt when it first arose, nor a memory of a time moved through, but the power of a story. There was something out there and it demanded exploration.