scared I'm not Creative anymore // pulled summer fragments mostly abt giving up
This Is Not An Essay (it's leftovers)
I love the color blue and motifs and physical copies of magazines. I love that stupid story about the duckling that’s really a swan. I love the elephant necklace my brother gave me when I turned sixteen and the real gold hoops my mom gave me last Christmas and the fact I’ve only ever taken either off to fix them.
This is not about Grief. I Am Going To Write Something That Is Not About Grief.
I’m looking at the street I live on, the sun reflecting on the bricks, caking everything in red. Men stand in the doorways of stores that all look the same, calling me to come closer for samples. I’ve learned not to even look. The sun is hot: I feel alive again, but it’s only because I’m burning. July is the most brutal month.
It’s Sophia’s birthday. Saturday night. I’m sitting in a tiny diner with her family and they are asking her little brother about his new girlfriend. I am attempting to find the calories of a single waffle on the menu and thinking about how high school relationships are so fruitless and Sophia is telling me that this is the year she’s begun settling.
She’s not saying that, actually. She has never said that and she never will. But she is talking about her internship with the state that she likes but she also doesn’t like and the way she’ll probably work for the government and that’s what she wants except for it might not be and actually, she isn’t entirely sure of what she wants and that’s scary. I’m the one who asked if she was settling. And this is her birthday, she’s twenty which she has been waiting for despite my warnings: “It’s all downhill from here!” Maybe I am awful for even bringing that idea up as if she’s never thought of it at all but I’m always thinking of my dad and his paintings, the way I haven’t been writing since I started working full time, and I’m thinking Sophia is so good. I can picture the memory of her unscathed by her summer burden. She’s so perfect, and she’s still in there.
I shouldn’t put words in her mouth. I am the one who is so scared.
And I can’t find the damn calories.
Recently the question on my mind is the one all my friends seem afraid to ask–I’m wondering when it is time to give up on your dreams. I come home from my shifts early enough to write or paint but I don't. I’m so tired that I can’t–or at least I can’t produce anything good. Any remnant of energy I once had is long gone, but I’m not stupid enough to believe I can still be a writer if I don’t write, an artist if I don’t create, well-read if I don’t read, skinny if I don’t stop fucking eating. Sophia says she has no idea what her passion is, that I’m so lucky I can even feel this way, but for me it’s a prison and she’s wrong. She’s wrong about all of it. I remember when I met her, seeing passion exude like glitter on her skin; now she comes home and her eyes look like they’ve stopped seeing color. There’s passion somewhere if there’s a lack of it, right? We’ve become the kind of girls who sleep through late afternoons.
The waitress is here, everyone has spoken, Sophia’s mom is looking at me like I am a puzzle to be rearranged and retried. I want to go home, move back into the blue room at my parents’ house with paint on the carpet, but last week when I finally broke down and asked, my request was denied. I’m a big girl and there are things I should start giving up, dreams to put to sleep. This is the next fifty years, I’ve been told. I have to learn to be okay with it, not let it consume me like it has been but really, I’m spending my life trying to sneak past this stage, as if giving up is something physical, a lurking monster that will grab me without warning, rip all the pages out of my journals and leave me a shell. I truly believe I’m the kind of girl who is meant to stay bursting.
I order the waffle. I wonder if it will make me feel normal.
It’s called thirty days to joy, and the one rule is I have to make an honest effort. I have July, a month where it is not cold and I should not be sad–nobody can say I just gave up. Nobody can ever call me weak.
I moved into my apartment in June. I also started working, I think mainly because I’m living with my best friend and she was concerned enough about my relatively unstable income [REDACTED] that she got me a job at the coffee shop she works at. I don’t want her to worry and I figured anything’s a step up from [REDACTED], so I took it. I’ve had what I call real person jobs before, especially in high school, but they weren’t as consuming as this is. They were a couple shifts a week, you know? But I’m living kind of on my own now, I’m paying for school, I needed a big girl job, at least for the summer while I could do something like that.
I’m not even going to try and sugarcoat it: I try really hard but I’m not a very good barista. My dad says I should work at it, then–I’ll probably be doing it a while if I’m still on that writer shit. I can’t even be offended, either. He’s probably right.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful. It’s not exactly like what I was doing before was lucrative, but (and maybe this is awful) I didn’t hate it. I mean, I was poor but I’m still poor and you know, I was like, alive. I felt…well, I’ve never fully felt like a person, but I was closer than I am right now.
So I haven’t written anything in weeks now. This is the first time I’ve been able to and it’s like…not anything. I don’t know what this is, actually. Some sort of weird manifesto? “Oh, boohoo me, I was finally able to get a job in a city where it’s literally impossible to get a job and now I can’t be an artist anymore?” Like oh my God Riley, literally fuck off. It’s not the end of the world. Write about how you can’t write, be that person, maybe if you’re desperate enough you’ll ask someone if it could be something? My God, if I ever met myself I’d probably go home and tell Sophia about how I met this girl I wanted to punch.
Logically, I know nobody cares if I don't put out a piece this summer. No one knows I exist–like, how many people REALLY read Bedroom Time Machine? Twenty? And they were all my friends anyway? That’s probably even optimistic. But I care, you know? Like, I’ve got this competition with myself and I’m simultaneously rooting for myself and psyching myself out to the point where if I have the energy to write, anything I write is…well, it’s not even bad. It’s just not good.
It feels like the end of the world, though. In case you hadn’t figured that bit out. I feel a little like I’m drowning and screaming so loud and no one hears a thing.
Days later, I’m in the car with my father, pushing tears down the back of my throat like a semi truck in city traffic. I’m telling him I don’t have it in me to keep being meaningless and I am praying he pits the religion for three seconds and can talk like he did when I was a child, tell me that under no circumstances do I sell my soul to the man. I used to think he was crazy, he’d give me the speech and I’d be thinking that eventually I would find some way to be useful in this world–by the time I was old enough to care about whatever I turned into, I wouldn’t want to turn into something artistic. He says he always figured this was how it’d be with me. Okay, so I’m useless, but I’m consistent.
After To Kill A Mockingbird was published, it did really well, and rightfully so. For a while, people were anxiously awaiting Lee’s second novel, wondering how in the world she would outdo herself. Apparently she was wondering that too–to the point where it stressed her out so much that she never did put anything else out. Go Set A Watchman, known to be an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, was published in 2015 as one final cash grab by her publishers from her estate. Lee never consensually published anything after To Kill A Mockingbird. Her well had run dry–or at least, that’s what she believed of herself.
And I’m sitting there and I’m bitter and I want to be a bitch, so it’s like, why do you even care that I haven’t been writing? I know I sound like an asshole, but I’m sorry, I can’t help it. She says it’s because I’ve got something. All anyone ever tells me is I’ve got something, though, and I don’t know what that something is anymore. Hope? Depleting. I’m a shitty barista and a bad christian and an okay writer who hardly even writes anymore. I get up from the bar and go home. I’m not mad at her, I’m mad at myself. The only thing I’ve ever wanted to be is a writer and this was the only paragraph I could come up with from the whole night and it isn’t even a good one.
Regardless. Eventually.
If this were an essay by any other writer, it would probably have a trigger warning.
If me talking about killing myself makes you want to do the same, that may just be deflection. I’m sorry.
This is an essay about me wanting to kill myself.
(Kill myself.)
(Die.) (kkhhhkkkkkk) (off.)
(myself.______off myself_)
(Like I googled how to tie [REDACTED].)
It started earlier this summer when I realized—
About a year ago, I finished and published what I consider to be the best piece I’ve ever written–or, at least it’s my favorite. It was published small scale with an indie journal so it’s not like it got mass acclaim or anything, but the people who read it enjoyed it and it was real and raw and I was proud.
A couple months after its publication I moved back into school for my sophomore year and on move in day a senior who I knew but never had really talked to came up to me and told me that she’d read the piece over the summer and it had stuck with her, and she told me to keep writing.
This kind of thing has happened a few times but for some reason this is the one that sticks out to me–maybe because it was so spontaneous, you know, she was with a friend and so was I and she still felt really moved to tell me I guess, but yeah I think about that a lot. And on another real note, if we’re doing that, I guess doing that whole thing and feeling so creatively fulfilled by it set…some sort of precedent, I guess? I’m not really sure, but I’ve been chasing that lately.
I’m so scared I’m not Creative anymore.
I wish I could figure out why my boss looks at me like I am a motherless child.
It is the summer before I turn twenty-one. I’ve gotten an apartment for the first time and am doing my best not to run a [REDACTED] emporium out of it even though cash tips, quite frankly, are not currently covering my living expenses and I am going hungry on the regular. Instead, I’ve taken to painting. Not because I’m good at it. Everyone thinks I should be because my parents met at art school for painting but I actually am a bitch and therefore ended up being slightly more okay at writing than I am anything else. My mother pretends she isn’t disappointed by this, saying she’s sure if I applied myself I could be whatever she wasn’t. My father believes I am like him, though: creative. Probably a prodigy, and also probably an eventual failure. I’d hate for either to be right, but as I watch the ink on the envelope of [REDACTED] start to swim in my sweaty hand, I know whose odds I’d bet on.
I think, ok, I’m going to kill myself. So I count my cash tips.
I think, ok, I’m going to get my tragus pierced and then I’m going to kill myself. Except we all know I didn’t do that last part.
The first time I read To Kill A Mockingbird, I found it on one of the forbidden, abandoned bookshelves in my parents basement. It was the summer after sixth grade, I didn’t really have many friends, and it sounded interesting enough so I decided to give it a read. I had to sneak onto the computer at 2am to google what rape was, then to google how to delete search history, but aside from those harrowing moments, it very quickly became my favorite book–it actually stayed my favorite for a really long time. If you haven’t read it, you should.
This book tells a really important story about race and justice in the 60’s in a rural Alabama town. I’ll spare you the summary, go check it out yourself, but what really struck me in the book was Harper Lee’s use of language–her prose. This was I think the first time I’d ever been aware that I was noticing that in a book rather than simply the plot of the story. And of course I’d been writing forever, but that kind of made me realize that writing was something I might want to do seriously. I wasn’t even thinking of a career at that point–I was like eleven–but I was taking this and thinking that hey, maybe I could do it too. I saw the impact language had on me and it made me want to learn to write well rather than just write.
For a while during my early teens I would take Harper Lee’s style of writing and try and apply it to my life, whatever things were happening to me at the moment. And obviously I sounded like a bad fourteen year old knockoff of Harper Lee, and using that style of writing on middle school drama was melodramatic to say the least, but because of this, I eventually began to develop a style and a voice and things that are deemed important in writing. I don’t want to toot my own horn but I’m not bad, you know? I’m twenty and I don’t have much but I have one thing that I don’t completely suck at. I’m proud of that.
I stopped writing poetry largely after I wrote Skin. After the success of To Kill A Mockingbird and feeling pressured to live up to it–if not outdo it completely–Lee never published another novel. It’s not the end of the wo
Sophia and I acquired a free dining room table from a childhood friend of mine. We still have to build it, but I’m learning that actually having a table is more a social obligation than anything else. We aren’t big eaters anyway, so we have until August.
We made a list of people from school we want to become friends with. We resolved to have quarterly pasta nights where we invite groups of them over to try and get to know each other. I don’t think Sophia is as self conscious as I am about not having lots of friends here, but I think she has to be pretending at least a little that it doesn’t bother her. We went to a party and I was struck by the small group who stayed here for the summer–the girls in my grade who only remember to like me when we’re all drunk. I’m not upset by it anymore, but there’s a part of me stuck on the fact that they feel the same about me. Sometimes I feel like when I’m looked at, people are only looking through me.
Our common room, the one we’ll put the table in, overlooks Main Street. Sometimes the smells of seafood boils and sugary ice cream and fudge waft in. It’s a nice location–close to school, and we have a great view of parades and friend groups gallivanting during the day, hordes of girls in little shorts and tank tops laughing, families with strollers who I’ve probably made coffee for at least once. As I watch them and the clock each day like a dog until Sophia returns home, I decide I’m going to learn to make the best pasta sauce on this side of the bay. I will bring bones to the people I want to love, who I want to love me back. It won’t fix everything, won’t build the table for us, and it’s one more thing I have to do, but it’s something to make me feel less alone and I think that will be worth it.
So I am standing in the hallway outside, digging through my bag for my keys and listening
To the whirring of my electric fan flow through the ghost walls and echo around me as if I am still in bed.
I have left the radio on in my room. I begin to hum along,
Realizing in all things I may just be significantly untrained.
ODD LITTLE NECESSARY FOOTNOTE
No, I don’t think anyone has made it this far down but if you have that’s sooooooooo crazy hi.
This is not an essay. You should know that because I put it in the header but in case I forgot: this is NOT an essay. These are actual pieces of my actual writing from July and early August—most of the pieces these came from are unfinished and/or the worst things I have ever created. Most of these fragments, as you can see, are not my best. Some of them I wrote very seriously, some on post it notes at work, some high as a kite after. But I do think together they feel like some little story, albeit a broken-up one.
Yes, the redacted bits are ACTUALLY redacted there are ACTUAL words there that I chose to take out but it’s not stylistic I promise.
I am not nearly this sad anymore. I think I need to say that probably.
Thanks for reading and if you actually made it down here you should comment which fragments you think I wrote high or if I were to actually think about order instead of copypasting my July google doc how you would arrange them (or whatever you want obviously just thanks for being here)
oh yeah this is good. still waiting on that pasta sauce recipe though.
please don’t delete this!