Published
"The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That is the moment you might be starting to get it right." —Neil Gaiman
On my twenty-second birthday I fell down a flight of metal stairs at an Italian restaurant that I do not plan on returning to. I stood outside with Ben and Maeve, feeling the throbbing, swelling contusion on my left thigh. Between drags of his cigarette, Ben continued to express his frustration with my anxiety about graduation.
Ben left school two years ago. He took five years to study sculpture, a pandemic interrupting the practice, and fell in love with painting the woods in Alaska instead. We spent the past summer living together—I sat upstairs writing while he painted in the sunroom. Ben couldn't quite grasp why someone four years younger than him would be so worried about the future he had just gone through, a future now behind him. I rocked back and forth on my kitten heels attempting to listen but stared at my own reflection in his sunglasses. There is a little red light that blinks in the middle of his brow when they are recording me. I cannot warn those around me when I am remembering details I will soon write down.
Maeve stood there watching us, creating a triangle by standing slightly askew. In taxi cabs she tells stories and reminds me to not write them down. My breath smelled like vermouth and she saw me anxiously eyeing the clock, waiting to return home. I take my writing inertia with me wherever I go. She sits next to me like an old friend who has just moved to the city, tagging alone for she has no where else to go. Maeve sees her too, shoots darts at her when her nails dig too deep into my neck. Inertia has been talking about the fifteen pages I am behind for my thesis. Maeve snatched her off my neck.
She looked at me with an unwavering focus. "Don’t let the great be the enemy of the good."
I’ve spent the majority of my senior year of university verbalizing my anxiety about the future to anyone who would listen. I splash around in a puddle, pleading with every passerby to help clean me up. I know that, with all this time spent hosting the grandest pity party, I could have figured out a plan—a linear timeline—but I’ve never been able to read an analog clock.
Professors of poetry and 18th-century literature have given me advice: sit down with a pad of watercolor paper and scribble with soft graphite, listen to the sunlight's slant in the winter afternoon, walk around with index cards in the park until it feels right. This vomit of worry landed me in my second-year philosophy professor's office hours: Dr. Hawke. The last time I’d been there, he suggested I might be dyslexic. In reality, it may just be aphasia. I told him about all my ideas—how I could go into publishing, entertainment, or start to sell pictures of my feet to forty-year-olds. Hawke absorbed my echoes of unrest. The library sitting around his corner office, all of his books staring at me. They all got over the inertia. They taunt me. They project their assurance back at me and laugh. In front of him sat an opened book in ancient Greek. The man seemingly knew the root for everything, but not for my malaise. He was confused—why wouldn't I just do what I sought out for?
He said, simply and plainly, "Lucia, the world is your oyster."
I stared blankly back at him, then replied, "Only if you have the confidence to see it that way."
It’s difficult to tell someone with so much intellectual authority the truth; that the reason I’m so afraid of getting started, of committing to something, is insecurity. Pursuing anything creative is risky. Quite frankly, pursuing anything at all involves risk. But at the precipice of pursuit lies change—a transition from a world you know intimately to one you can’t even find on a map yet. There is a certain confidence needed to jump from the world you’re familiar with to one that’s entirely shapeless: the world of being a working writer.
Above me, a loud analog clock ticks relentlessly, reminding me of each passing second, bringing me closer to the day when I’ll have to make the leap. A day when I can no longer hide behind the university's closed gates and assignment portals, where I write with their language and sleep soundly knowing only one pair of eyes will read my words. I know, deep down, that in order for my world to feel fulfilling and beautiful, I must leave this place. I spent my entire life knowing exactly what I wanted—an Ivy League education—but now I've realized that it's locked me in this ivory tower. What I really want is the more authentic expression of who I am—maybe a little pretentious, but still obsessed with the low brow, the tacky, the buttered pastas of the world.
so you want to be a writer?
Charles Bukowski asks in his poem.
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
In a room full of doors that lead to different paths, the only one that feels warm and inviting has a brass plaque with a bit of patina. It says "writer." The door is flaking white paint. I cannot see what hides behind it. The ghoulish fiends I've met in my nightmares, where I fail and do not succeed, whisper all the things I should be afraid of. They creep around the corner of the hallway and want me to freeze, to turn around, run, to avoid opening this door. The true obstacle standing in my way is not a lack of access or education, but my own fear. There is a balancing act in our future—how to decide whether to take the easy path or revolt, running toward your dreams, no matter the bruises that will accumulate along the way.
Dr. Hawke said that the only way to defeat the rising coup is to create great art. There is no paint on my fingers, no splinters in my feet, no gallery shows with my name in vinyl lettering presenting itself to the street. Only words, their various combinations, and what I remember to write down will be my weapons. My armory. The battlefield, the white page. The drowning attempt to find a room of one's own. The general is a command of narrative. The writing a provocation of war.
Come May, a tightrope will appear down Broadway. The protective nature of academia, that I have never really excelled at, will dissipate. It will be up to me to remove my cap and gown, strip down to my bare feet, and climb onto its wire. My arms will extend like Christ on the cross as I balance, inching down the avenue. Everything will be on display—the bruise on my thigh will fade, but the scar on my shin will remain. The stomach fat that gathers on my lower abdomen, the tattoos down my ribs, the hair on my wrists—they’ll all be subjected to the wind coming off the Hudson. Take me down to the writing house, I’ll whisper into the wind. I believe my feet will carry me where I need to go.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
