Chapter 8 #2
“Maybe you’re putting too much pressure on yourself,” Chris says when he gets back and finds me furrowing my brows at a blank
Word doc on my computer.
I was hoping to make some progress on this little retreat of sorts, but Tribeca’s corporate energy hasn’t exactly been conducive
to creativity.
I roll my eyes at that. “Oh please,” I say, shutting my laptop quickly before he can have a peek. “Have you met me? I’m the
opposite of type A. I’m a sovereign woman who isn’t trying to please anyone else.”
But there’s also this lingering whisper that makes me wonder if Chris is right. Maybe I am getting in my own head about this,
comparing my success to Tara’s and everyone else’s. It feels like I’ve got this ball of ambition inside me that’s begging
to get out and bounce along the streets but it can’t escape. There’s no opening.
It’ll get out someday, though, I know it.
I have this feeling that I won’t be someone who makes it big till later in life, but that will position me well.
I’ll be fresh in the public’s memory when I die and they’ll levy a tax on the rich to build the EJ Museum.
Not that I’d want a museum. I’d much rather have some street mural, but it would still be flattering having so many people bunched around my artifacts, celebrating my contributions to the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Piecing together chunks of my life, trying to trace back to the root of my genius and coming up short.
“Have you tried a writing workshop?” Chris asks, and I can tell he’s really racking his brain to try to help. If I were in
a better mood, I’d find it nice, but right now it’s just annoying. “One of Olivia’s friends does one every week,” he says.
Just the vibration of Olivia’s name in the air makes me sink even lower. “Those things are Ponzi schemes for amateurs,” I
say dismissively. “They make you pay so they can tell you what’s wrong with your writing and they force you to submit a certain number of pages by specific deadlines.
It’s all about quantity over quality, just for people who’ve got no confidence or no discipline. I’ve got both. I’m just in
an ebb phase of the ebb and flow right now, that’s all.”
Chris says maybe I need a vacation, a change of scenery, and I laugh at that and say my whole life is a vacation. “That’s
the way life should be,” I declare. “If you need an escape from your life, you’re living wrong.”
I go on to explain to Chris how I could sell my scripts in two seconds flat if I sold out and conformed to the industry’s
bad taste, but I’d rather never be remembered than be remembered as a sellout. He looks uncomfortable at that, like it’s triggering
his own introspection.
“For clarification, I don’t think you’re a sellout even though you do work for an evil capitalistic corporation,” I say. “You’ve
just leased your soul for a while, not sold it. You’ll get it back eventually. I’ve got a good feeling.”
“High praise,” Chris deadpans. His soft brown eyes twinkle with embers that look like they’d have potential to catch fire
if he let them. I always like it when I have that illuminating effect on Chris.
He looks happy, like he had a great weekend.
This makes me kind of bitter but I’m also glad he enjoyed himself.
He needs a break from all those people who send urgent emails with too many ASAPs.
He’s a manager at his accounting firm, but he’s told me he still feels like he’s far down on the totem pole and the stress really gets to him. He confides in me like that.
“Glad to hear it,” I mutter. Dropping his eye contact like a hot potato, I kiss Arnie and then scurry out of there, walking
east along the cobblestones toward Delancey Street. I need to find my rhythm again and there’s nothing like the Williamsburg
Bridge for that, stretching over the East River with complete grace and authority. It’s a piece of art with purpose, and that’s
all I aspire to be, really.
The walking and cycling path is a level above the cars, between the purple-pink beams of the bridge. There’s all this graffiti
there that I like to read. Graffiti poetry is the only decent poetry there is because it’s not trying to be anything it’s
not. This bridge always gives me exactly the words I didn’t know I needed. Today it’s this: Whatever happened to slow, slow dancing?
There’s something so simple but piercing about it. It rises and then falls inside me and makes me want to slow-dance right
now—just stop and rest my head on someone’s shoulder and sway to an old-fashioned symphony, both of us bundled up in sweaters
and coats, cozy clothing only. I want Chris to be the one I’m dancing with, but then I remember how ridiculous that is. We
live on two different sides of the bridge, which might as well be two different sides of the world. Also, I don’t even like
slow dancing. It’s too boring.
As I keep walking, my mind bounces all around but doesn’t land on a new plotline long enough for me to jot it down in the
notepad on my phone. I think about how constricting it is to plaster ideas onto the page where they can never move around
again. The most beautiful stories are the ones that have never been written. The ones that are still floating to their own
bohemian beat, never speared by a pen, never captured by a keyboard.
Maybe I’m not supposed to write stories after all.
Maybe I’m just supposed to dream them up and launch them into the universe and then they’ll fall back down to Earth as cosmic energy.
Land as stardust in a woman’s coffee mug, be the inspiration she needs to break free of an abusive relationship, to trust the power in her own legs and run away. Follow her wild and never look back.
But I’m not spiritual enough to believe in that. There’s no divine justice in this universe; just look at the news headlines.
And even if my stories did make it into the ether, I wouldn’t like how no one would know that I was the one to create them
in the first place. My own greatness wouldn’t be attributed to me. I wouldn’t even get a footnote in the history books, so
what’s the point really?