Sometimes, late at night, when too much coffee or one too many cigarettes keep me up, when insomnia lurks in the back of my eyelids, haunting me with tasks left undone, I turn over and stare at my computer. It glows white in the darkness, and on the cover dances the images of half-empty word documents, scribbled notes in the text pad, barely coherent ideas.
I wonder where I went wrong. Where I gave up on the dream.
When I was young and idealistic I told myself I'd be a writer. I'd read Gingsberg, Orwell, Burroughs, Thompson, Rimbaud, and my heart filled with jealousy - jealousy, the prime mover of my whole being - and I said, I too will write. It will be like all the romantic stories: I'll move to New York, go to school, impress the teachers with my pure talent and crass attitude, drop out to travel on a motorcycle, be dirt poor, work as a waitress, and by famous and published by 22. Complete stardom and mobs of fans by 25, at the latest. Stumble into a rock band, reach Jim Morrison-proportion, change the entire concept of poetry and fucking and death. Tragic motorcycle and drug-induced death by 27, like all the greats.
Where did it die? When did I give up? When did the blank page beat me to submission, to a hopeless inertia?
I've mulled over this question for ages, along with self-pitying tears and woes of "I shall be no Poe, I shall be no Rimbaud."
Was it the pressure? All my high school teachers gazed at my with a starry-eyed look and told me of the talent I had. Sometimes I could hear their internal thoughts, "this will be the one I reach, this will be the one that makes 30 years of this shitty public school job worth it." Maybe it was the razor lace of my parent's encouraging words: Writing? Well you damn well better become famous. We didn't come into this country and claw ourselves up from the dirt, sacrificing our health to earn a buck to put a fancy name on your degree just so you can type pretty words and earn an hourly wage.
Maybe I got into the drugs too soon (was that part supposed to come later?). Maybe I lost sight of myself. Maybe the idea of people reading my work is still so terrifying as to paralyze my fingers over the keyboard.
Or, most terrifying of all, maybe it just wasn't in Miss Cleo's cards.
One of the first happy memories I can remember was receiving an empty notebook as a present, and drawing on every inch of every page. When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I said an artist. I wanted to draw forever.
My parents said nope. My art teacher rolled her cart around to my elementary school desk, slammed down a piece of newspaper paper and after a few of my proudest scribbles, said "I have no idea what that is." I was told to re-do assignments.
Now when I pick up a drawing pencil to paper, I feel like I'm trying to write down my deepest urges and darkest desires in Swahili.
Perhaps I only turned to writing in the first place as my only means of capturing those intense colors my retinas register: the bright red and the dark blue and the image of a yellow balloon bobbing on top of the ocean waves as the sun breaks over them. Just another means to tie down that balloon and tell the world it's there.
But I stuck to writing for so long, that it had to have been in the cards, even if temporarily. So what stopped me?
I think back.
Way back.
And remember the time when I put the pen down, when I stopped trying to finish those documents.
And as I recall,
it was just about the time... when I looked in the mirror, and realized
I had forgotten I wasn't white.
No comments:
Post a Comment