Ten Moments in the Life of the Writer

1. I am in second grade. Our class is visiting the church for adoration and prayer during the yearly 40 Hours’ Devotion. I’ve been kneeling for what seems like hours, and I am trying to pray. I have my eyes closed tight. Something comes over me as if light had a feeling and it grew like a fungus in the stomach. I think it might be grace.

2. I am writing my first poem. It goes like this:
Candy canes, O candy canes!
Big ones, small ones, on my window panes!
I wanted to eat one but Mom said “No!
“Wait for Mr. Ho, Ho, Ho!”

3. It is the second day of high school. I have brought a piece of writing of which I am proud to the class about which I am most excited. In front of me is a tall black student whose braces fell off. He never bothered to get the glued-on pieces removed. He reads what he has written and every fear I’ve ever had about not being good enough comes true. I am trite.

4. I am realizing that the only way to be an artist to be as cynical as possible. I am being told that poetry doesn’t exist. I will believe this for a while, and try either to write small vignettes that don’t work as prose or huge action-packed monstrosities that are not what prose should ever be. I will also write essays, and slowly get the lesson beat into me that I can only write about things I know. I will learn that no one can tell me what my writing should be.

5. It is Christmas and I am receiving Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems as a gift from my mother. I am sitting in the back of a Christmas party, mouthing the words to myself of “Sunflower Sutra” over and over. “We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside.”

6. I have lost something. Always in my life there has been some undercurrent of loneliness. I try to combat that in many ways, often through my writing. But frequently the world seems too flooded with hypocrisy and injustice to overcome. The worst is when I see those things in myself. Times come where I am too depressed to speak. I stop doing anything. I reach a point where I have given myself to so many people in hopes of receiving compassion or understanding that I have given up. I can not reach out for help when I need it. My writing is frenetic and muddled: “His smoke raises to feed dusty stars. She wears luck on every finger. I run fingers through her hair, through lonely rings in her spine and sigh. Lame driver, can’t you see? Pin me down, there’s no luck in my spine. I hide it in my fingertips.”

7. Later, I will tell people that it felt like I was on auto-pilot, but now, I am thinking very clearly. Even later, I will know that it doesn’t have to be what makes sense, it just has to be the truth. I do not want to live anymore. It makes sense. The note says, “This is the truest thing I will ever write. I am not a writer.” I am searching in the bathroom cabinets for something sharp enough. I’m not sure what would be. Later, I will search for the razor and assume my parents threw it out in the days afterward. My dad knocks on the door. I cry harder than I’ve ever cried. I am ashamed. Later, I will still want to die.

8. My mother is signing me up for swimming classes so I get more happy chemicals. When I was young, it took me three years in the same level of swimming class to learn how to dive. I was the class project. I would stand on the edge of the pool, my hands in a feeble V pointing to the sky, panting, frozen with fear. Day after day for three summers hot tears would inevitably fall and the kids would look away as the instructor patted me on the back. I think his name was Mark.
“You persevered and you were so happy when you finally did, though.”
“I wonder if I still can.”
“I hope so. You’re going to have to learn to swim all over again if you don’t.”
It’s funny, the things you remember. The warmth of the room. The smell of chlorine in the back of your throat.
I am excellent at treading water. I am on the edge of learning that might not be good enough.

9. I think love works like this: There is one moment where you spontaneously find yourself fitting exactly and perfectly into another’s existence. You then spend the rest of your life fighting as hard as you can to stay there. That’s what it’s been like for me with writing. I figure at one point, this whole lifestyle decision to take stock on how I experience the world and record it, to give myself the daily terror of sensitivity, to be a poet, must have made sense. The struggle is fierce and passionate. I find myself wondering constantly how it is possible that there are three billion people on this tiny planet and so many of them still manage to be lonely. But now, when I feel alone, I realize all I have to do is make a poem to keep me company.

10. I am standing on the beach. The two of us have taken off our shoes. We are holding hands and staring into the sea. It is freezing. We are stupid to have spontaneously taken the train to Atlantic City on a cold day. I have my eyes closed tight. Something comes over me as if light had a feeling and it grew like a fungus in the stomach. Is it grace? Is it love? Will it keep coming back? Is it his, or is it mine? Do I have a choice? I feel like I am standing on the edge, my hands in a feeble V pointing to the sky, panting, frozen with fear. I tiptoe to the edge of the coast and let a wave run over my sandy feet. Shivers run through my body, and I squeeze my poem’s hand tight.