Remi Ashford, I say. A firm handshake. Author, nice to meet you. And then, the inevitable follow-up questions. What have you published? Where can I find your work? I smile and say, ‘oh I haven’t published anything yet.’ The lights begin to flicker. Shadows creep up the walls, swallowing the room inch by inch. A switch is flipped, and suddenly I am standing in the dark, still holding out my hand. Perhaps I ought to make a spectacle out of it. Climb onto an autopsy table, tear myself open, let a rib or two hang precariously over the edge. Take the contents of my heart and lay them out beneath the unforgiving glare of a surgical lamp, each little piece of me boxed in a glass, labelled, catalogued, presented for public inspection. There. Surely this should do it. This has to be proof enough that I was here. Because god forbid there should be art and no witnesses.
I’d rather bleed out and call it aesthetically pleasing, call it horrifically upsetting than admit that I desperately need to be held, comforted and coaxed into believing that this is all going to be worth it.
My thumb hovers over the call button. The same name. The same little green circle. I stare until the screen goes dark but I don’t make the call. How am I to entrust my heart to those who’ve made a revolving door of my life, arriving with the spring and leaving me to the winter? Who’ve given me a few of their brightest days, only to the count minutes, the conversations, the little offerings of affection, as though love were a ledger and I had been running up a debt? I have been buried alive in the silence of it all, and still, some mornings, I wake with the ridiculous conviction that there has been a mistake. Someone will come looking. Someone will ask me why. Instead, I am told they know nothing about me. Nothing.
And then I sit through another monologue about their lives, their heartbreaks, their little catastrophes as though nothing between us ever shifted. As though intimacy were a house they could keep entering without noticing I had moved out. It is so much easier to call me closed off, reserved, difficult to know. Easier to make a mystery of me than to knock on the goddamn door.
So I turn to the one thing that has sustained my will to live. Writing. The one place where I have never quite had to ask permission to exist, even if I have spent an inordinate amount of time begging the world to notice.
There is an old philosophical question about a tree falling in a forest, its branches splintering against the earth, its last breath consumed by the wilderness. If there is no one around to hear it, has it made a sound? There is no audience and it falls all the same. The forest doesn’t hold its breath for a witness and yet here I am, wondering whether the sound of my own existence amounts to anything if it never reaches another soul.
The last couple of weeks have been a roller coaster of emotions. And then I heard something that made a rather inconvenient home in my head. An interview with David Sedaris. He started writing in his twenties and didn’t publish anything for years. It’s been over thirty years since he’s been writing for The New Yorker. He says, “you know, you suck because you’re twenty and this is your time to suck, you know? And you’re going to suck for a while. If you are thinking of publishing everything you write and you’re twenty, you’re on the wrong path.”
I am not saying he’s right or wrong. But something about the idea of letting this craft live, grow and even be terrible in the privacy of its own existence stayed with me. It made me think of something Taylor Swift once said in an interview, “When I was 12 years old, I had the luxury of spending thousands of hours working at my craft, practicing, making mistakes through trial and error — and that was all completely unobserved, right? So that was just me and my craft… If I had one hope for you, I would say that I hope that you get to nurture your hobby and your passion — just between you and that craft.”
There is a precarious line between keeping the doors shut and flinging them wide open, between nurturing something in the privacy of my own world and dragging nearly everything I’ve ever written into the light, on this little corner of the internet. I have spent so much time wondering whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in a forest that I have hardly stopped to consider what it means to be that tree. To fall, to make a terrible earth-shattering noise and have no one turn around. I have grown so accustomed to being witnessed that I no longer know what to make of a life that isn’t. I’d make a better artifact than a person.
I have no private archive to speak of. No repository of half-formed characters, abandoned plots, sentences scribbled in the margins or stories waiting patiently for their turn. Nothing I can retreat to when the words refuse to come. My creative process, if one can even call it that, is a sorry affair. No rituals, no sacred corner of the room, no summoning of ungodly spirits to coax a story out of the ether. Just some soul-crushing hurt, a splash of anxiety, and the vague, desperate hope that something might come of it.
My identity comes from my work. Came, from my work. When I dropped out of college, I remember walking around the campus with a thick stack of papers tucked under my arm, printouts of every article that I had ever written. Look at this, I wanted to say. Look at all the things I have made. Look at this insignificant life of mine, spilling out of the confines of your classrooms and corridors. I am bigger than this place. I have to be. Between those sheets of paper and the desperate conviction with which I carried them, I thought I could find an easy way out. And when it all came crashing down, when the grand escape with the hopes that I’d have the last shard of dignity left recoiled and came back to bite me, I turned to writing as through it were the last remaining proof of my existence.
If I don’t publish, I don’t exist. If I don’t put something out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I begin to disappear. The evidence starts to dwindle. The world goes quiet. And somewhere in the back of my mind, an unpleasant voice begins its inquisition. Am I serious enough? Am I doing anything with my life? Am I even trying? Without the ink-stained pages, the words flung out into the world, this heart of mine laid bare for someone, anyone, to see, I am left with a rather inconvenient business of having to believe in myself.
What a terrible business that is, when such a colossal piece of my identity has been built around the work I produce. Because this is what I know. This is what I have and I like to think I am at least half decent at it. So I take my little stack of words and climb onto the nearest rooftop, waving them about like a flag, screaming, “Hey! I’m here. I exist. Just letting you know. Thanks.” Some days, I think I am simply attention-seeking. Other days, I am on my knees, holding out my hands, begging to be seen. Most days, I cannot tell the difference. I don’t know what I want. I only know that I want it terribly. And that’s supposed to be fine. Except sometimes, it really, really isn’t.
At least the dead are mourned. The truly invisible are afforded no such indignity. No one to turn to when the walls begin closing in, no one to say, I understand, you’ll be okay. So I say it myself over and over until the prayer curdles on my tongue and the devil, having found me alone, makes a home in my head.
There is also the small matter of having dropped out of college and finding myself with a life that seems to be happening everywhere but here. No lectures to attend, no corridors to walk through. Graduation and the life of my classmates that I watch behind the glow of my screen. People move on. And I am right here. Right where I began. Just me, the hours stretching endlessly before me and this ridiculous, beautiful, occasionally cruel thing called writing. When it is the only thing happening to me, how could I possibly ask it to bear anything less than the weight of my entire existence? A bad day. A day when the idea fairy has taken a holiday and left me to rot in the ruins of my own imagination, the world collapses. The end of the world. The end of me.
Now that I have stepped back from the wreckage of all these thoughts, I find myself wondering where, exactly, I am supposed to stand. What becomes of me if I shut the door on the whole goddamn thing? If I take my little book, retreat to my room, slam the door behind me and sit cross-legged on the floor, writing and writing and writing until the words make no sense… just me and my craft. Me and my notebook and no one else.
And then I throw the notebook against the wall. I watch it hit the plaster and fall, pages spilling open like something wounded. I toss the loose papers into the air and they flutter down around me, a confetti of everything I have ever wanted to say. Here I am, sitting in the middle of it all, surrounded by the remains of a life no one has seen. No one has read. No one has thought to look for.
And naturally, I have to write about it.
Am I caught in a paradox or is it really not that deep?