Yellow Sticky Note

“A man is sitting on a bed on which a dead woman lies.” Just one line. On a yellow sticky note. He wrote the note. He put the note on his desk. He let it sit there. He did not understand what it meant. He did not understand what drove the words and why they sat there. A message? A code? A quirk? So they sat there. The man. The note. The clue right alongside of the cluelessness. He saw it. Ignored it. Pretended it wasn’t there. Pretended it wasn’t anything. Pretended it wasn’t important. Pretended it would pass.

It stayed. He went about life and the note waited. Until he saw it. Really saw it. Then one day he knew. The man sitting on the bed was Rusty Sabich. It was Rusty in the note. Who was the woman? Where was the man just sitting there? Where had Rusty been in the twenty plus years since he was acquitted? It was Rusty and that took the sentence on the yellow sticky and turned it into a book.

The man with the yellow sticky note on his desk was Scott Turow. Rusty is the character in his first published, best selling book, “Presumed Innocent”. Harrison Ford played Rusty in the movie. Scott went on to write other books. His first however remained silent. At least he thought it did. It loomed on a yellow sticky note until he realized it had more to say.

Maybe Scott just made up the story of the sticky note. The writer in me believes the note is real. That is how the Muses work. They let us think we are done. They wait and then they let us realize we have more to do. That is how the process works. When we let it. When we let the yellow stickies stick around and gnaw at us until we see.