Good news: A literary agency requested my full manuscript about a week ago.
Bad News: I haven’t written anything in a while, other than melodramatic diary entries that are more embarrassing and revealing than creative.
I had a revelation last night, one that shocked and dismayed me to the point of smoking a cigarette, something I haven’t done in years. I was being wasteful of time and energy, binge-watching that show “Scandal” on Netflix, when the main character said something like, “Because if he doesn’t remember what happened, it’s like he doesn’t care. And if he doesn’t care enough to remember, it’s like he’s implying that it never happened.” My jaw dropped because those words express my fears and anxieties so exactly. For quite some time, I’ve been hiding from and rejecting the very possible reality that I have been forgotten, and that I am not missed. I need to genuinely understand and embrace the possibility that the entire experience was all my creation, that it is all in my head and it was only ever in my head.
But I fight with myself. I swing back and forth between being a scared, stupid and silly girl with a crush, to a woman who was in love but was denied. One option makes me interesting while the other makes me weak and foolish. Both options, however, are definitely unappealing. I think about the events that transpired constantly, and do my best to remember vividly how it all was because those memories are all I have, the only evidence that I crossed paths with someone amazing at all.
That truth depresses me, nearly knocks the wind from me.
But I’ve told all of this before. Maybe that truth is what really depresses me, that I have nothing new to say as I am stuck.
Heartache may make a woman more interesting, but I think I’d be content to be boring for a while, so long as it meant that I was happy.
Yesterday, I traveled to Adrenaline – the tattoo and piercing place – because I lost the horseshoe for my nose and wanted another one. There was a young woman at the counter whom I would have sworn I had never seen before in my life. But as I walked up, she asked, “Are you Bean?” I replied in the affirmative, and she asked me if I taught at the high school and again, I replied in the affirmative. I asked if she was a student, or the sibling of a student, and she surprised me by telling me she was a classmate. We rode the bus together when she was in first grade and I was in fifth, and I would tell her stories on the ride to and from school. I have no recollection of it, but the idea that I’ve been telling stories all my life makes me smile.
Until I consider that I’ve been telling them to myself. I think the fairy tale I’ve stored up in my heart may be nothing more than a story. I wish my writing could change that. I suppose that’s why I do it.
