I am not going to write for a while.

I waited a couple of weeks to actually type that sentence because I did not yet know if I was on a brief vacation hiatus or a Guns n Roses Chinese Democracy is coming soon! hiatus. Having no sense of a timeline, no desire to draw a timeline even in sand, it is time for me to say it. Writing has ceased to bring me joy. I have been writing for the wrong reasons, and I need time away to love it again.

At this time last year, I had great expectations for my writing. A literary journal of note had longlisted one of my short stories for a prize. An author of greater note had praised my work. I had finished my novel and gotten an agent to represent the novel, which was sent to acquisition editors at whichever publishing houses you’re likely name without googling.

You can probably guess this, but neither that short story (nor a couple others since) nor the novel have garnered any offers. My agent and I have parted. A small press has requested a partial manuscript of the novel, and there are a couple other presses I will query, but the odds do not look like they did twelve months ago. In other words, I’ve been on a losing streak, which should not matter. I’d like for it not to matter. When I began writing a novel, I did not have an expectation that it would get published; I mostly wanted to see if I could write a novel. I think I was prepared for failure and a return to the drawing board, but I was not prepared for almost.

I started thinking of my writing in terms of a nascent career, which is to say, I lost sight of why I wrote to begin with.

Two weeks ago, I had a plan to draft chapter 13 of novel number two. I entered my favorite local coffee shop, but seeing bodies occupying every table, I lost my will to write. I mentally listed the different locations where I could write, the playlists or the beverages or the reading that might ready me to write—and I realized that if I had to try so desperately hard to make myself want to write, I was doing it all wrong. Thus began my hiatus of undetermined length.

The thing is, by any reasonable measure, I have attained my goals as a writer. When I joined Prose four years ago and wrote for the first time in years, my dream was to get a piece of my writing accepted for publication. After a whole lot of work and a whole lot of encouragement from my fellow Prosers, some still here and some departed, I gave it a shot—and I succeeded. I succeeded several times over, not with any big name mags, but with half a dozen short stories and nearly as many poems. Thanks to the fluke that is the alphabet, my contributor’s bio has appeared on the same page as a former Poet Laureate of the United States.

If you’re a longtime Prose user, you might remember a Random House/Prose essay contest that George Saunders judged. When he selected my essay, and I sent him 25 pages of that thus-far unwanted novel as the prize, I hoped I might get a paragraph response with some general thoughts and maybe a piece of encouragement. Instead, I received three full pages of enthusiastic notes. At the top of his email, the man who wrote Lincoln in the Bardo told me, “You’re a wonderful writer. Your prose is crisp and fast and convincing.” I will never forget how it felt to read those words.

I will feel that way about my writing again. I will love writing again. I once wrote in a Prose challenge that creative writing “feeds not only on my technical skills or logical analysis, but on my capability to express to someone else how I think and feel, with the center squarely on the ‘I,’” and that fiction is “an output of the core, internal self.” I will find that self again. I have written 28,000 words of that second novel, and I will finish it. Two weeks into my hiatus, I can say that and believe it, which is progress.

You will probably see me less for a while. I am not disappearing; I’ll pop in to read some posts now and again. If I get any good news about my submissions still floating out there in the ether, I’ll let you know in a post of my own. I’m not yet ready for next steps, but somehow, someday, that first novel of mine will see the light of day. Sooner than that, I’ll write something. I’ll probably post it here. I might feel an irresistible itch and resume writing this weekend; I might not write for a year, or longer. I do not know when it will be because I will not rush and I will not write until I can do so with joy and for its own sake, but I will write.

Keep writing, friends.

Ryan

Hello Prose family

For the last two weeks I have been looking to hear from Danceinsilence (William Pate).When I didn't hear back from him I checked on here and hospitals in NC and on Instagram. Nothing until today. I decided to call the police and had them to do a wellness check on him. The police called me back and told me that he passed away on the 25th of July but they found him in his apartment on the 28th. His investigation is pending and they wouldn't tell me how he passed. He was 76.

He was a lot of people friend on here so please leave your memories for his soul to take with him. I cried enough tears to fill a coffee pot and my face is swollen. Please give tribute and check out his writings. He was a genius and the coolest person I knew, and he will be missed! :(

F

they say that hair holds memories

well, you cut all yours away

our friends crowded in your green tile bathroom,

taking turns snipping the strands,

letting them fall

letting me go

i was over the atlantic somewhere

when i stopped fitting in your hands,

and your heart, and your hair

we made eye contact at the carnival

you are so tan, and your eyes are so blue

the connection lasts a breath, yet i ache --

i hardly recognize you

For Ellie. You will find it. You will, you will, you will.

It has come to my attention that every young person in a certain stage of life must experience some capacity of willing displacement in order to keep themselves alive. Children join scouts and go camping; it satisfies them. My mother incessantly quotes Eat, Pray, Love while laughing at the idea of her friends on Disney Cruises. We paint our lives in such a way that they look open, whether that be to adventure or hope or beauty, or maybe all of it, and then we hold off from the act of experiencing it for as long as we can. After all, how many garishly memoir experiences can one life hold? Don’t we want to do it right? If you’re going to find your “it,” after all, wouldn’t you want a perfectly timed sunset in the distance and every word of a prewritten New Yorker Arts and Culture piece flowing from it? We practice calculated restraint until it nearly kills us.

When I first saw the city I was nineteen years old. It was May and it was muggy and thick. I took my ultimate joy from the idea that I was running away and even if somebody had half the mind to care, they couldn’t stop me. I wore a lacey top and shorts I’d altered from a pair of my father’s old jeans. I’d begun taking a liking to the way my body treated clothes like a swimming pool. Through lack of choice, my nineteenth summer had determined itself to be the sort of period in a young person’s life very suited for baselessness, and in that I wanted every part of me to match. My internship had fallen through. The reasons were well enough beyond my control that I could blame God, so I did. Prayer was never a concept I could fully grasp–the act of speaking to an enclosed space felt mocking towards the mortality I hadn’t asked for–and despite my best effort to muster up my courage and do the damn thing, I didn’t seem to have it in me to approach God face to face. A bus ticket cost six dollars, though; I had a friend who had an empty apartment and a couch. If nothing else I figured my nihilism and I might enjoy the Smithsonians.

The question of why we leave, why we must, is one I have asked rather persistently, one I’ve attempted and failed repeatedly to loosen my grapple on. Ellie was leaving, this I knew with certainty, that when I moved back into school her apartment would not be her apartment, rather one overtaken by characters foreign to me. I knew she was not coming back, never fully, but it was also never my plan to stay either, so how could I of all people be a hypocrite? I’d read Aristotle, about motion and animals. I thought maybe I could be one of the smarter girls in my class, set apart, taking a small chair at a table that seats one, lecturing to a wall painted with faces. I knew my family would love me, but I knew they didn’t know what to do with me. School would start again eventually. Ideally, Ellie would call, but I wasn’t too naive to know there was a likelihood that she wouldn’t. She left because the city got lonely. I leave because I want that. Better, I assume, to shed singularity among the masses, where there may be some sliver of hope for connection. I figure cities walk a tightrope of humanity: it’s one thing to be independent and another thing entirely different to be truly and thoroughly alone, but worse even to be alone enough in the way I was, thinking that you must be the first person in the universe to experience an emptiness quite this vast…after all, I thought, if I wasn’t, how is anyone still here? All this to say I’m writing about summer and loss in the same way that I always do. I’m also feeling rather wordy, so this is the time to dig out the cheap wine. Drown yourself. It’s chalky at the bottom.

Contextually speaking, I did not come into the summer dreaming of a grand exit. Despite personal denial surrounding my return to the hometown I swore I would, in fact, never be returning to, there were attempts made to aestheticize the experience. I took my leftover pills from school by the water at night and wrote bad poetry once they hit. I hid alcohol under my mattress only to promptly dig it out and drink it all, rapidly. There were halfassed job interviews, forty thousand step days, antique stores, whathaveyou. People talk about regression, but coming back is more of an Eden: a sudden, unprompted nudity. No matter who you are, who you may have turned into, if you were a lonely child, still you will be a lonely adult. So, as it was with most lonely children, I decided the crown jewel and singular redeemable trait of my town to be the library, and my sole task for the summer was to read the physics section in its entirety. It was one shelf. Singular.

Youth is plagued with the notion that they can be the one to save the world, each one individually. Most people can medicate themselves out of that. I could not, though I have tried rather copiously. I say this so you will know that never did I actually think I could build a time machine. I said I’d try, but I’m not even sure that was the goal. I’d like to sleep through summer, yes, but my answer to that wasn’t forward motion. I wanted to go back. I’d read enough memoirs to know that devastation, utter isolation can be aided but never cured. Why move forward, save for the fact that there was nothing else to do? Why go forth into the wreck willingly? Why not relive it again, and this time do it right?

Theoretical physicists have for years debated the possibility of moving backwards. Particle accelerators make it so, in theory, we should be able to move forward (with recognition that we’d be stuck in whatever future we travel to) but there seems to be no scientific, logical way to move to a set past. I had a lack of dedication to the cause. I discovered the same thing that every scientist in the past hundred years has: there is a missing link. We don’t know what it is. I read the books and returned them and slept for three days, waking up to sob over the phone to Ellie. “I am grieving so much.” I couldn’t enunciate the extent at which she was a part of that. The next day, I printed the time machine equations and put them in the chest under my bed. I packed a bag of clothes and a book about space travel. It wasn’t going to be a bedroom time machine, it could be Mars or a city of similar volume. I left.

It’s a very good thing to be young and in a city, I think especially when you’re poor. I suppose everyone does it once, whether they mean to or not, but I held my consciousness of the whole grand scheme in a very high regard simply because I knew exactly what I was doing and I was doing it with a very calculated purpose. I thought of what I’d tell my father, if he ever chose to call: I figured it must be making me smarter or more interesting or prettier, because every girl here had the kind of look to her where you know that if her degree falls through, modeling may have been the more viable option anyway. I texted my friend, “everyone is so kind here,” and she called me, confused. “The men in the street call me differently than the ones at home.” I’m not stupid, but I am gentle enough to be mistaken as such. Anyway, it’s all a novel kind of lostness until you look down from the apartment balcony and watch, as your vape clears, two people fistfight in the alley below. The neighbors downstairs are fighting. Somebody’s screaming and you can’t place any odds.

I have yet to find a home. It’s been a theme and it will be one. But what I can find are places. This is to announce that I spent thirty minutes entranced on the second floor of the Air and Space museum. Yes, I cried at the planets, because everyone does, but the space suit made me numb. Thirty minutes I stared. What was it–something about the way an empty fabric body bag had seen more of the world than anyone gaping at it ever could? I couldn’t help but ogle, let my mind linger at what Neil Armstrong must have thought coming back to earth. How can you come back after seeing so much? Is there a way to come back or forever will I be stuck feeling as though I grew out of something? Can a person grow out of their world, the whole world? I went back to the apartment late and applied to a space camp on a whim, hoping they didn’t see timestamps on applications. Alabama. I’d been a camp counselor before, it wasn’t too far a cry. I’m not the kind of person who could stay in the South forever, I know this. But I’m not the kind of person who can stay anywhere. I figured I’d never left the east coast–it wasn’t going to be a bedroom time machine or a trip to mars or the sheets I’ve had since I was eight and I couldn’t couchsurf forever either–for two months, it could be Alabama. It wasn’t not a space suit. It could be Alabama.

You know how this is going to resolve itself. If you are reading this essay, you know I’m not going to get it and you want to see how that plays out, even if that may be a bit morbid. Instead I’m going to do that thing writers do–you’ll curse at me–but I’ll tell you that when I was eleven, I decided it was my destiny to be a singer. I couldn’t yet play guitar, but I figured out how to arrange my fingers so they mirrored a melody, wrote five songs and a letter to my parents and church leaders apologizing for leaving, but I really had to go. I put my dolls in a box at the top of my closet, sat on my bed, and sobbed. I took the box down. I brushed my hair. I still have the letter and it’s probably best that I never went ahead with my plan. I can’t really sing.

One summer ago, fresh into adulthood, I bullshitted my way into a ticket to Alaska with a church choir. The idea of seeing the world and saving it seems synonymous to me, likewise seeing the world and it in some way saving me. I think there is something unexplainable so intrinsically wrong with me, and if there is no God, if there is nothing, there is still the world; if I am still here I can still be saved. I thought Alaska would take that place. The vision was something along the lines of me lonely on a mountain, screaming my problems into the open air as I hiked up, coming down empty and free. I guess I should have prayed more, or not used the words bullshitted and church in the same sentence: the point is I got covid seven hours before the plane took off. I cried until I slept, and I slept three days until I woke back up to mourning. It’s a party story now until I’m drunk. If I’m drunk I’ll still swear it would have fixed me. So no, I wasn't shocked when I didn’t get space camp, if not only because summers and I seem to have a sort of track record. I did not grieve. I stole the keys and some hair dye, stained the shower and cleaned it, and then I went outside and thought about killing myself again. I called Ellie. I read myself poems and smoked and gagged down the side of the balcony. I went inside. The red around my eyes settled before my friend even woke up and I waited another day to tell her.

But I was in the city. I could not grieve inside. I smoked every square corner of the wharf, waiting twenty minutes for a swing chair and proceeding to not move an inch from it all day. I caught my reflection in a boat mirror and was shocked by my brightly dyed hair, my face losing its childlike puff. Adulthood had gotten up and shaken my hand and stricken me across the face with the other arm. I looked away from the water, in fear. I looked just like anyone else. A parent pulled their child away from my secondhand smoke, a man attempted to seat himself next to me. He may have been kind but I was no longer safe, not to or from anything. Later that night on the phone I whispered to Ellie, “I’m not going to save the world.” It was the first time I’d ever told the truth on the matter and it tasted like vomit on my tongue.

Ellie cleared her throat. “I know. But I think there should be something that means more to you–for you–than that.” And I couldn’t tell you every word after even if I wanted to, but I remember how her voice got, subtly quieter and steadying. I will tell you the world cupped me in its cracked hands and the city lights were dim and flickering, car horns blared, people screamed. It was a place. Anywhere was just a place. It wasn’t going to be here, and maybe it wouldn’t be anywhere at all. The only thing acting as a savior had ever been me, constantly, unknowingly moving myself forward. A body is the only time machine, and constantly I am putting myself in drive and considering slamming the brakes. I am not a Christ. I am a nineteen year old girl who is losing the ability to play pretend.

Ellie asked me where I was. I told her I wouldn’t do anything rash. I still don’t know exactly how she meant the question–I find my travels so frequent and unsurprising that I forget to give updates. I’d been in the city for nearly a week, and time had moved so strangely it could have been a month. I remembered but an hour.

My sadness is senseless, quite honestly. I may be the only person I know who runs away with this frequency. I also know that when you’re running, things get blurry. It isn’t fair to wish the world would slow so I could see it but I’m going to wish it anyway. I’m going to wish that when I’d moved out a summer ago I packed my room in full so there was nothing to feel bad that I couldn’t go back to. I wish I could sit. I wish I’d said better goodbyes to people, right now to Ellie. She’s pensive, very thoughtful. I know she’ll be fine and likely happier. I know this wouldn’t have mattered any more or less but I wish I could have said goodbye sober, looked at her and told her to be safe. Cities can be dangerous. I know she’ll be safe. I still wanted to tell her to be safe.

In a lot of ways I grieved, I grieve, myself. There is a lot I could have been, or at least I imagined so. I spent the earlier part of my teen years feeling caged and now the latter part rebelling. I feel like somewhere there is a middle ground and if I find it, there I'd find me too, much older. I haven’t met myself in a while. I don’t look in the mirror much. I’m a size small and I don’t like what I weigh. I wonder constantly how unattractive I must look, nicotine in some form dangling off my lips like a pacifier. Nineteen is a giant toddler, so selfish, so aware.

I spent most of what I think deep down I knew were my last couple days in the city in that same spot on the wharf. Retrospectively I’d like to be the kind of person that thinks it’s sweet that even in the busyness of the area surrounding me that spot was always open, but I think it was probably just the fact that nobody else had any desire to sit in the direct sun. I walked around, realizing I’d picked up lyrics and street signs and I grow into things fast. I could get around the city with relative ease. It wasn’t shiny, it wasn’t anything. It was a city, and I wouldn’t see it for the first time again in many years. Neil Armstrong and Ellie and the city and me–every story is the same, every aftermath unspoken.

There is so much I’m going to experience, so many people I’ll meet and so much I’ll lose, and maybe that’s all life really is. Maybe that is the culmination of youth, why it hurts so bad. I am watching all of these lanes converge into one, but the loss and the gain don’t ever fully cancel each other. I’ll get back to school and meet people and miss Ellie. I will love my family but live with the inability to live with them, refuse affection from my mother but want to plead with her to give me a chance, people think I’m nice. I will not eat dinner but my friend will make two servings in case, call me and tell me she’s waiting. I’ll try not to forget my cigarette butts. I’ll try to move quickly so her food doesn’t get cold. This place and all of its tourists–slow goddamn walkers.

Every city is a small city if you’re expecting something to stay vast, and the anticipatory nervousness surrounding it is not a friend that lingers. You will get lonely. You will want humanity again. Likewise, every man is just a man and I am just a girl without a frontal lobe. The city didn’t bore me but as July approached with its vapidity, I began to experience the nostalgia that comes with comfortability in a place: I missed the smell of cheap detergent. I applied for positions in the town where my parents lived. It was time. There was a desire to see the space suit again once more before I left, but I never got to it. Knowing how novel emotion is, though, that may be for the better. I never said I was going home. The whole point is that there is none. But in the way that I can catch a cheap train and sell all my clothes, the ways in which I am young and summers will stay long and dire, if it kills me, I will find it. I will, I will, I will.

So in this, there isn’t a conclusion, no definitive answer so long as I’m alive. This isn’t another essay about killing myself, but it isn’t exactly not. I’ll keep on going if I can, for as long as I can, growing as old as I can bear to. Maybe someday I’ll sit somewhere and realize I’ve grown up from nineteen: my “photos” and “baby photos” folders all convoluted and all the things I’ve seen will have montaged themselves into a sort of unreadable humid mist, every kitchen the same unreflecting stainless steel. I might not remember it, but I hope I see a lot. I hope the beauty, the knowledge of it, doesn’t fade too quickly. That will be enough. Now it’s enough. Maybe it’s all that ever has been enough.

----footnotes---

Um. Hi. It's been a minute.

I don't really come here anymore, at this point I feel like I'm a bit old and it's all a bygone from an era that I've successfully lived, loved, and love still, but don't feel the need to re-enter. Something I've found about writing is that there is no poet like a sixteen year old girl and I've mourned that fact heavily. Every so often though, I'll write a piece (like this one) and remember how at sixteen or seventeen I would have anticipated comments and critiques for it. So please comment. Critique.

I turn twenty this year (crazy.) I'm getting a degree. After that I'll probably get another one. I'm trying to be a professor, for whatever that life update's worth, and I focus most of my time on mathematical philosophy. If I knew you, I love you. If I have yet to know you, hi. I'll probably take this down in a few days. I don't know if anyone will see it, I don't know if anyone's still here but I'll use my old tags and be curious. Maybe there'll be something else posted like this someday, maybe not, but everything else will stay here. A relic. It's a pleasure to be young.

I think I might love you but it’s one of those things where it’s not worth it if I don’t. When I look around my room I see your limbs draped along the bed frame, pieces of your heart taped on the wall and propped up on the shelf. When I think about my time here I imagine ocean waves crashing with your voice, something stupid that you said to make us laugh. It’s one of those things where if I had to pick the best aspects of my life, they would all trace back to a few ways that I’ve felt, and those would be remnants of moments with you.

But I’m not stupid. I’ve made peace with the fact that I grew up too fast and left behind the innocence of wishing on dandelions before I fully blossomed. Now I’m something of a witch, grumbling on the shoreline, swaying to the wind, standing tall and independent. I don’t expect to be picked, and I’m content with where I am. A tiny part of me is even glad that you keep me around – never the object of affection, but a wise constant in the scene.

If I do love you, I’m scared that that’s the worst thing I could do. There will always be girls who are prettier, flashier, more me than me. I know every type that you like, every glimmer that catches your eye and warrants a cheeky joke in my direction. If I love you, I am signing myself up for a lifetime of battle scars, every new connection for you matching a burn on me.

So I think I’ll fold this intuition up and bury it in a moving box as I pack up my mind. It was just a lapse in judgment. You own too much of me; I will never let you get close enough to see.

I’m learning to love your music again

to make it my own.

It will always remind me of you.

The sleepless nights

and the tireless days

spent thinking of you.

Your music once filled me with joy.

But it’s yours.

Now that you’re gone,

I’m desperately trying to get that happiness back.

It’s slow going.

I still haven’t deleted my playlists meant for you.

Lately, life has been for the kids too afraid to grow up. The ones who sit on the swings on their elementary school playground, wishing time would freeze. The girl who just got into her dream school, who suddenly wishes she could go back to sleep. The group of boys taking off their jerseys, never to play a high school football game again. It’s bittersweet; it melts on your tongue.

Life has been suns setting and steam rising, the smell of fragrant new beginnings mixing with the lost scent of a fabric softener you haven’t used in five years. It’s funny how long we spend wishing for things to change, and when they do, we freeze.

but if jesus is still

awake i wonder if he'd tell me

at what age

he disconnected his

gmail from his dad's

and if it came out of a place of

anger or if he just turned eighteen

one day and decided to

change his password.

but if he stays up late like i do, i'm

already feeling this sense

it's

probably not the latter.

when i was nine years old i

crashed my grandmother's laptop.

do you think she remembers this

every time

she searches for youtube?

probably not, but i do.

i've written the same ghost

story book over and over again, it's

the one 

i'd steal from the scholastic

book fair and hide; it's

the childhood bible

that i never picked up.

have my parents ever thought that maybe

their child is mad at them?

is everyone's heavenly daddy

immune to this, am i 

the system error? is my father's

hallowed name restored?

i have been thinking this

in every different brain in this body

for months, i cannot

close my eyes to sleep 

without seeing a hand coming to pluck me from this

hell and drop me into another one.

when i was nine years old i

let my friend run me over

on my new bike.

does she think of this when she

wins races now at college?

i still care.

it still lives in my mind,

a feeling of fire and tangling of

legs.

and if god didn't 

leave his son i wonder if things

would have turned out different for every other

kid in the brown green earth,

because if you can't even get the attention of your

dad as some sub-human

sub-god 

person thing

then what the

living hell am i supposed to do

when all mine cares about is my

geometry grade and 

old gmail

and the search history i've

deleted hours ago?

i hope i can still find it

sometime after this, if it can't

seem to dig itself into a grave.

they say once you do something it will 

always be out there so i've

grown up hoping

everything is forever.

that my best friend never dies. that

my grandmother never dies.

that my childhood bike can

decompose into the earth 

and see me again someday. someday, maybe...

when i was nine i found a dead cat on the walkway near my house.

does god plan this when he makes the animals?

i'm sure he probably does.

For Father's Day, my lovely daughter-in-law signed me up at StoryWorth (https://www.storyworth.com). She wanted her two children (my little grandkids) to have something to remember me by. Some sort of connection.

How does it work?

StoryWorth sends me a year’s worth of story prompts. I respond to them. During the year, those responses are shared with a select group of friends and family via email. At the end of the year, my grandkids will get a hardcover book with a color cover.

Wasn't crazy about the idea at first. Why? Because it forced me to face my own mortality. (At age 74, that can't be far away.) How do I cope? By ignoring it, mostly.

And so I write. trying to be honest and insightful, but at the same time realizing that by the time they're old enough to read and understand these ramblings, I may be gone.

Not an altogether pleasant thought.

Then it hit me: "Why not share these little write-ups on Prose?"

Not that y'all are interested. (Most, probably not.) But, at the very least, you'll know I'm not dead ... yet.

"Hoo-Ray!"

Besides, some of you might want to respond to the questions I'm answering with your own thoughts.

There it is. The answer to the "Why?" question. Not complicated, but felt I had to do it.

So what do you think? Would you take on such a project? Either way, let me know.

Thanks . . .