Published: May 8th 2019, 10:06:46 pm
I haven't really written anything in about a year. It's been something I've been struggling with a lot. There's a certain amount of confidence required to write things that you might try to publish. You have to believe that what you're writing is worth writing down, that you can write it well enough to be worth reading, and that it's worth taking the risk that people on the internet might be mean to you.
So, when you're just starting to get your work actually published, and you publish something that means a lot to you and make a very small but important mistake that causes said piece to be removed, and causes someone on the internet to spend at least a half hour telling you that you're a horrible and incompetent person who shouldn't be writing anything, well...that confidence goes away and has a hard time coming back.
Yes, even writing fiction. Yes, even writing in a journal.
But I've been slowly pushing myself and today I finally managed to write a whole chapter. It's the beginning of a novel that I'm frankensteining from two of my old manuscripts that never quite worked. One was too long, too mundane, too caught up in the minuta of the real life story it was based on. The other was too short, too weird, and lacking in grounding details. They were both based on relationships I had that failed. After much internal dialogue, I admitted that those two relationships were not really all that different from each other.
That was back in october. Eventually I started working on another book because I was getting nowhere with this one. I staunchly told myself that I would *stick with this one* and immediately lost momentum. But since I now had a project to cheat on, I started working on this one.
Anyway, here's a possible first chapter. I have a lot of fears wrapped up around this. So please be nice.
I knocked on his door and a girl answered. A girl who wasn’t me.
I maybe should have expected that more than I did. We broke up a couple months ago. I just didn’t really believe it. Not exactly. I thought we were confused, taking some time off, figuring ourselves out. I didn’t think we were breaking up forever. I certainly didn’t think we were moving on already. We were supposed to be soulmates. We were supposed to get married. We were supposed to make beautiful theatre together. And now he just…what? Makes a phone call and re-casts me?
She just missed being me by a few inches. Like a casting director had only a vague description to work from; early 20’s, short, dark hair, on the thin side of pear-shaped. Her boobs were a little bigger than mine. She seemed more girlish than me with a butterfly-spray of freckles over her upturned nose. Even worse, I’d never really liked her. Oh, of course I knew her. Why would he date someone new?
I knew her from classes. She’d always chafed at me in a way I couldn’t name. She was too soft, too sweet, a marshmallow-y fluff of a girl. She annoyed me in the same way that Portland, Oregon had annoyed me after I moved to New York. It was just so… nice. No intense word could be applied to it. Just nice, that bland little word that won’t melt on your tongue. There were no sharp edges, no harsh grit to make the beauty shine. Like Portland, her personality just lay down and made you do all the work. I’m sure she was vegan. She’d cried in class when we talked about Medea. As if it had never occurred to her that mothers sometimes murder their children. There’s no good reason why that would bother me but I hated the saccharine taste it left in my mouth. Of course he had dumped me for her. What guy doesn’t love a girl who cries all the time and just needs him so much.
I couldn’t talk for a minute and she just stood there like a funhouse mirror.
“Is Dylan here?” I asked, and he stepped forward like everything was normal. He didn’t rush forward to hold me or let out a sigh of relief the way you’re supposed to in these situations. He was just…there.
“You’re alive.” It felt stupid when I said it. He was obviously alive. But up until now I hadn’t been sure. Two huge buildings had just shuddered and collapsed. Nearly three thousand people had just died a few blocks away. Everyone else was suddenly an extra in an action movie; shocked and scared, waiting to see if a new attack would happen and asking themselves how the sky could be so goddamned blue. Didn’t nature have the decency to react when the world changed?
No one’s cell phones had worked because too many people were trying to make sure that the people they loved were still alive. I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know where he was. So I went to the bar to see who else I could find. If anyone wanted to makes sure I was alive, they would have gone there first. But he never showed.
It was days before I could find his new address. Four whole days of wanting nothing more than to feel his arms around me, to hear him say “It’s all going to be ok.” It wasn’t ok. It would never be ok. But I thought I could believe the lie if it came from him.
We’d broken up two months ago…no, not even that long, it had been less than two months. But the breakup didn’t matter to me anymore. I still loved him and I knew he loved me. That’s how love is. It lasts forever and it shows you who really matters when you’re in a time of crisis. He mattered to me. He somehow mattered even more than I thought he had. His was the name that stopped my heart when I took inventory of whom I might have lost that day.
But he was here. And he was alive.
“I know,” he deadpanned.“Isn’t it great.”
That was it. He didn’t move. So I didn’t move. It was all I could do to blink. It was like he had forgotten his line. I wanted to say “I’m alive, too, you heartless jackass.” But it didn’t seem worth the effort since he obviously didn’t care. Years. We’d been together for years. We had lived together and loved each other. We had sworn to get married one day. But one little month had gone by and I meant nothing to him. He just stood there, as heartless and beautiful as the sky. His empty gaze made me feel hollow, like I was bleaching down to an outline under the sun of his indifference. If I stayed standing in this doorway much longer I would fade away to nothing.
“Great,” I breathed. “Well…good. I guess I’ll see you around then.”
I took a few slow steps back, then turned down the hall. The floor felt slanted and the walls moved farther away, like I was in a dream. I wasn’t quite sure where the floor was anymore and I weaved a little as I walked away. It was not supposed to be like this. We were supposed to love each other. That’s supposed to last forever. And now he didn’t care if I lived or died?
“Amanda,” he called down the hall. But he said my name like an obligation. This was no romantic movie. He was not about to chase me down and kiss me in the rain. He just said my name because he felt like he should.
“Amanda, wait!” He was more urgent this time. I stopped, steadying myself on the wall. He disappeared for a moment then jogged down the hall to me. He’d changed his mind. He knew he was wrong. He loved me and would always love me. With each approaching step our future life returned to me; The brownstone in Brooklyn our fiercely smart and beautiful children, OBIE Award-winning power couple Dylan and Amanda—
“Here.” He handed me my Arden copy of Macbeth. “This got mixed into my stuff.”
“Oh.” The world dropped out from under me. Again. How many times can that happen in one fucking week? My empty voice threw out all the banality it could muster. “Great. Thanks.”
Thunder cracked outside. Sure, now it rains. Now the weather acts like something dramatic is going on.
“You got an umbrella?” He asked. He was the only man I ever loved and now he looked at me like I was a stranger. Like he’d been replaced with someone heartless. This is a brick my mind quoted at me Your heart is a brick.
“It’s fine,” I mumbled and started to walk away.
I stopped at the door and turned around.
“What the fuck, Dylan?”
I saw him stop and his broad shoulders straighten. I’d always loved the way his body sloped inward from his shoulders to his hips.
“Excuse me?” He turned to face me.
“We’re supposed to love each other.” The words left me like they’d been punched out of my gut.
“We broke up,” there was an edge of ice in his voice.
“You wanted to marry me,”I wailed. “That doesn’t go away. That doesn’t just…stop. You said that you loved me! And love is fucking forever.”
“And then. We broke. Up.” He was fighting to keep himself from shouting.
“And then we could have died!” I decided I was ok with shouting. “If you ever cared anything about me, you should have cared about me then. Even if you couldn’t be with me, you should at least treat me like a friend.”
“We’re NOT friends,”he corrected me. It felt like a kick the solar plexus. My lungs lost all their air and couldn’t take on more. “It’s stupid to try and pretend like we are. This little outburst of yours only proves it. I can’t do this anymore and I don’t see any good reason to try. So it ends here. We don’t talk anymore. We don’t email each other. We don’t wave hello in the halls. At the end of this year I’m moving back to Chicago and I never want to see or hear from you again.”
Something stuck in my throat and I couldn’t tell if I was going to throw up or cry. Either way, Dylan wasn’t sticking around to find out.
I didn’t even feel the rain at first. I knew it was happening. Some distant part of my mind registered that it was raining but not a single part of me cared. I just walked like it was all I knew how to do. I felt like Tick-Toc the clockwork man in Return to Oz who had to wind different mechanisms for thought, speech, and movement. Each wound down at different speeds so sometimes what he said made no sense because his thought had run down before his speech. My thoughts and speech had all run down to nothing. Only movement was still left to me.
Dylan didn’t love me anymore. Dylan never wanted to see me again. Dylan had been the center of my life since I was 18. He was the reason I woke up most mornings. All the art I made, I made for and about him. Everything I did, I did with the hope that he would be proud of it. When I painted the apartment we rented together I had sanded, spackled, primed, and painted every single wall because, as he reminded me, every job worth doing was worth doing right.
Yes, I was aware that my break up, or, I don’t know, break up reprise, was nowhere near the most important or traumatic or stressful event of the week. But it really wasn’t helping. No one was more annoyed than I was by the fact that I was crying about my stupid boyfriend while I wandered through air that still smelled like burning Trade Center. But them’s the breaks I guess.
I didn’t even notice that it was heavy rain until my clothes started sticking to me. Even then I just tucked Macbeth into my armpit, hoping that my body could keep the paperback dry. As rivulets formed on my face I started to think I should find some shelter. That was when realized that I didn’t know where I was. Downtown is a maze under the best of circumstances. Nothing is open after 8, it may as well be in another city. All the buildings were dark and even the streetlights seemed scarce. But it was also raining so hard that I could barely see. You get past the grid and nothing makes sense anymore. The buildings are all huge and corporate or tiny and ancient. The streets run at strange angles and weird pseudo-parks crop up out of nowhere. Nothing looked familiar. I couldn’t even find a subway stop. The storm was getting worse. Wind whipped through the trees, threw leaves in my face, knocked against me so hard I lost my balance. Lightning blinded me every few minutes and I couldn’t even find an awning to hide under. I stumbled down a cobblestone street searching for sanctuary. I saw two old time-y lamps and a sign that read The Crossroads. Thank god, a bar.
Alcoholism runs in my family so I always told myself that I would never take a drink when I felt like I really needed one. But whatever. I ordered a well whisky, neat, because fuck you that’s why.