Chapter 31
Something shifts in me after Jenni gives birth.
I, too, want to have something to show from my thirty-one years of looping around the sun. Not a baby, no way, but the compulsion
takes over to sell a script once and for all. Time to sell out, write a formulaic little rom-com, and sell it to the highest
bidder. Then I’ll use the cash to take a trip somewhere where it’s summer all the time, or maybe winter would be better. The
cold sharpens the senses, emboldens the life force so much more than the heat, which only ends up lulling you into a droopy
sleep.
After that first success, I’ll have the credibility, the freedom, to pursue more creative, less commercial writing endeavors
down the line. And I’ll have a pot of money and an inbox full of fan mail by that point, the feeling that the world is waiting
to see what I do next. Not that I want the lobotomy wine-mom rom-com crowd to be my fans, but I’ll take them for starters,
then leave them in the dust when the more intellectual crowd catches on to my genius. How’s that?
I shut myself in my room for a couple days for a writing lockdown, leaving only for very important things like bathroom breaks, ice cream breaks, smoking breaks, Netflix breaks.
By the time the solitary retreat is over, I still only have scraps of a draft.
It’s an enemies-to-lovers story between a Greek innkeeper and a demanding American tourist, set on the bluffs of Santorini.
I can see where the whole story is going by the time I’m on the third page—never a good sign.
Inevitably it means I can’t bring myself to finish it because it’s too obvious.
Anyone could fill in the blanks; why make me do the grunt work?
“It seems I’m allergic to fluff,” I tell Tara, unlocking my door and rejoining her in the world of the living. She’s on the
couch, moping too, fresh from her latest callback rejection. “I physically can’t write something bad, even if it’s commercial.”
Tara builds me up, says she applauds my artistic integrity. “It’s a rare thing these days. All the scripts I read for auditions
are built on clichés, even the dramas,” she says. “Could feed a whole country with all the corn in those lines.”
“Exactly.” I try not to wonder where I’d be without Tara still at my side. “It’s a fucked-up industry, one big house of cards.”
There’s a lurking fear, though, that I’m the one who’s fucked up. That my mind is jumping and sticking in all the wrong spots.
I just keep thinking about Chris and the way he felt on New Year’s. It was a type of touch that cut through the numbness.
So safe, too, in a way I didn’t even know I could experience.
“Why do we always glorify things that are dead?” I pose to Tara.
“Still no contact with Chris?” she guesses, no transition needed.
“Nope.” I don’t bother to sound unbothered. “I thought about stopping by his apartment, but there’s really nothing to say.”
“Sometimes silence is more powerful than words,” Tara says. “I’m sure he can hear it.”
I do like this idea, but I can’t let my mind go there or it’ll get jammed in a broken motor, the blades spinning but going
nowhere. “It’s not like he was even that great in bed,” I say. “I’m just replaying it because I know it’s forbidden. That’s
how my home-wrecker mind works, you know that.”
“You’re the opposite of a home-wrecker,” Tara says.
“You create things, not break them. Just look at this place.” She gestures around us, to the Inn with its vivid walls, its slit windows, its calligraphy quotes from Hal that still show through the thin coat of cover-up paint.
“It wouldn’t exist without you. Neither would the Redstockings. ”
She’s right, of course. I found the listing to this apartment way back when, just like I was the one who built our friend
group into the formidable unit that we were.
“Existed,” I correct, the suffix catching in my throat. “Past tense now.”
Leaving Tara on the couch, I head outside, my thrift-store moccasins absorbing the dampness of early spring Bushwick. I wonder
who owned the moccasins before I did. Maybe a woman who ran out of an abusive marriage and traveled the world solo in a hot-air
balloon. The story doesn’t soothe or inspire me. It just makes me feel like more of a failure, like I haven’t done anything
in these shoes for the next person who wears them to really look up to.
I reach the Williamsburg Bridge without realizing that’s where I’m walking. Sitting down partway across it, I stay in the
middle of the path so the pedestrians and cyclists have to go out of their way to avoid me. It feels like the only power I
have left in this world.
Night has hit and the Manhattan skyline is a jagged wall of lights, the kind of thing that strikes you with awe until the
awe has ebbed and all it does is strike you raw. Millions of individual hands have to flip these light switches, night after
night after night. What’s the point, really?
When I first came to the city, everything felt big, endlessly big. I was sure that I’d expand to its size. But now the scale
of this place seems to be mocking my smallness, reminding me how many other people are vying for the same exact things. Everyone
wants to be the next great playwright; everyone wants to start a revolution. Except there aren’t enough slots and I wasn’t
born into money or connections and I’m abysmal at social media.
I’ve always thought that I was bursting with potential, that I’d tap it someday.
But now I wonder if the only things I’m bursting with are excuses.
Maybe I don’t have any potential at all.
Maybe I’ve spent so many years trying not to try that now I can’t even try when I actually want to.
I’m a flawed product of my own head games.
Maybe I just keep deluding myself that my big break will happen someday, but the only thing breaking is my own body. The body
I’ve tried to wash by bathing in mud, and now the mud is dried and cakey and won’t peel off.
Scooching to the edge of the bridge, I let my feet dangle over just a little. No one stops to see if I’m okay. Taking my shoes
off, I get ready to hurl them over the edge, like I did with that apology note Chris sent me so very long ago, or so it feels
with how time is bending and extending.
I throw one moccasin, then the other, with as much force as I can muster; it’s not much. They fall with an elegance that hurts
to watch. I can’t hear them hit the river, but I imagine I can, and I imagine they’ll float down the gray water and someone
meditating along the rocky riverbank will pick them up and wonder who wore them. I picture that person looking for clues,
swabbing the insoles for fingerprints, anything to try to find me. It comforts me a little until I remember it’s not real.
None of it is.
I’m barefoot on my walk back to Bushwick, trying to cut my feet wide open, trying to step on every broken bottle I can find.
Anything to break my skin open. But I already have so many calluses that my feet are just fine. I hardly even feel anything
and that’s a good thing, I guess. It proves I’m not hurt.