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A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman
Once upon a time and a very good time there were soft murmured voices that sounded like rain and warm arms and a checkerboard fabric, and that was the first memory. Friends coming and going: smiles and then gone. Her parents were vague half-developed images. No one had names and all stays were brief. She was alone, although she was not alone, ever. She was a little girl. The world moved like a spinning mobile and all the people seemed to know their parts. They danced around the center. The center was the sun. She didn’t know how to dance yet. She didn’t know who she was. She was alone and she didn’t want to be, because there had been a place that had been warm, and it had surrounded her, and she hadn’t wanted to leave but it was gone now. She had a little ticking soft brain and she didn’t know what went on in there, crying wasn’t enough, she couldn’t speak, and when she could speak it wasn’t enough, not quite enough. There were some things that her voice could not say. Already, life was so hard. The classroom was like a game of house, with students playing at children and the teachers playing at adults, everyone pretending to teach and to learn. The soapy water was warm and slippery. She liked to practice washing the tables while she watched the others. They were busy and the boys talked a lot, but she liked to read the book about the caterpillar that ate garbage and got sick before becoming a butterfly. There was one night that she had a dream about the preschool. It was a normal day and she was reading and it was sunny outside, like summer. The room was noisy but there no words because it was a dream and in a dream, some of the details go missing. Someone turned out the lights. It was cold, suddenly, and there was frost on the windows. The teacher was invisible and the students began to turn into ice sculptures and she was getting colder and colder. She got up on a chair because the ground was frozen but the ice was climbing up the chair legs. Everything was blue and white and black—even her hands were fading into those unnatural colors. Then he came—a boy from her class came out of the shadows and he picked her up in his arms and he carried her to the light switch. She turned the light on and everything was back to normal again. She was just a little girl but she was in love with the little boy—his name was Scott, he had pudgy cheeks, and he had brown hair that needed to be brushed—and he loved her too. But that was only in dreams. She knew she was a strange little girl. She knew they thought she acted funny. She liked to read, and she ate sugar cubes plain. She was still, but she was quiet and her eyes were always open and watching—except when she read, and then she was blind of the world. They thought she was strange, but she was happy to be who she was. She was shy, but she liked it when they looked at her funny. She felt special, and unique, and she was proud. She was only a few years old. Her name was Jessica, and she could write it in big round print and a soft italic. She didn’t understand herself, yet—she was too young for that—and she was only just learning what other people were like. She watched them. She stared. She never understood why it was impolite to stare, but it was, so when she got older she learned to take part, to lead the games during break time, to chase the boys and call them names; but she still liked to watch them play Capture the Flag during lunch while she sat on the sharp, unvarnished fence. They looked like a swarm of insects but they were brighter. They had more colors than insects do. They crawled over the playground like ants. She watched them like they were ants in an ant farm, sandwiched between panes of glass and set out for inspection. She hated bugs. When she was ten she thought that the world was over. A group of them had plans to run away. They had charted a course across the country and measured the miles that they would have to walk. They had made up names that they would use on the road so that no one would know they were those missing children. They were going to fake their deaths in the river and then they would flee their homes and never look back. The parents found out, of course, and she refused to forgive herself for letting the secret slip. Reading time was secret time and it was nice to be alone. She still read fairy tales and silly stories made for children, but she could read bigger and bigger books now. There was one book about a blind boy who was learning to see. She never finished the book and so she never found out why he was gaining his sight, but it didn’t matter. She could still understand it, because that was what elementary school was like: like learning to see after being blind. There was independence in reading the young-adult books, even if they didn’t always make sense. In the library she would walk up the stairs and to the back of the upper level, hoping that people were watching her as she made her way back to where the longer books with hard-covers were. She was proud to check them out and carry them, under her arm with the plastic protective covers slick against her skin, back to her mom’s car. She was getting older, little bit by little bit. She was getting taller. She could run fast, and when she ran like flying the wind had fingers in her hair that twisted it into shiny red knots, that made it stream behind her like fire. She wanted to run away from it all. Sh was growing up. Her old clothes were passed down the line to her sister and she had to buy new ones. Her hands were gentle and practiced enough that now, she could play the piano (like bells, but the louder, faster songs were better). Life was speeding up, faster, louder. She was still shy but her opinions stung now. She still watched but she acted now too. She had those crushes that would span years and every breathe made her heart feel broken, but she was wiser now than she had been and she could stand on her own two feet. She had grown independent, as much as a child like her could. Life got harder instead of easier. It got worse. She was too old but she was also too young, and that wasn’t supposed to be possible. She was unbalanced, but things were too perfect for that. She had kept her marks up her whole life and she had friends and she was dating this boy that adored her, and so everything was perfect. During class, she watched him draw on computer paper with his cheap, leaking, BIC pens. He had thick ash-colored hair that made a gentle curve back into his face, leading to his brow and touching against his lashes, the darkest eyelashes that she had ever seen on a boy. Looking at him made her heart beat a heavier, faster rhythm. He put up with so much inconsistency. He was always content to snuggle with her at one a.m. on Saturday morning. He had never been like this with anyone else before. She stared at him whenever she could and she didn’t know if he noticed or if he even cared. The future was rolling out exactly the way it was supposed to and all of the pieces were falling into place. She was lucky. The acceptance letter came two days later than promised, but the congratulations on the cover turned the extra days of worry into dust. It made her cry, and it made her mother cry—because this had been her first choice, her only choice, and while the others were shuffling and scurrying through college admissions, she was already done. She had played her cards well and her future was already promising—she imagined it in yellows and golds. But all the while there was something imperfect hanging overhead, a feeling that had nothing to do with all the luck and joys in her life. She would wake up and already know it was a bad day, when she couldn’t see the rising sun even though it was, of course, there. Her intestines would feel heavy. Her head would hurt with an off-center, dizzying headache. She would dress in black on those days, because black was beautiful and because it scared people away. The other students talked about her behind her back, and it hurt. She could hear the buzzing fly sound of their insults and the only way to cover it up was to talk more and know more and show them that she was smarter. So when they buzzed away she corrected the teacher in front of the entire class or argued with the boys that talked durning the tests. The students learned to hate her, and even the teachers grew weary of her attitude and her sharp tongue, but it was all that she could do. Even the best days had their turmoil. Very little felt like it was going right, even if life was perfect. She found ways to cope with what she felt but didn’t understand. She learned to keep scissors within reach and to smile so that no one would worry. She listened to loud, angry music. She stared and glared and hated, trying to turn everything inside to the outside. She still scared her friends, but she couldn’t help that. Things kept getting worse. She didn’t know why. Until one day when she was so upset she thought her body couldn’t contain all the emotion and still she didn’t know why, but this time she took a pen to paper rather than steel to skin. The writing she produced was long and scribbled and unintelligible, but somehow she didn’t hate herself any more. The writing was like ripping out hair, like pouring out blood, and afterward, those feelings had fallen onto the paper and were in her no longer. She could breathe again. That was the power of the written word, and that was how she decided that if nothing else, she would write. She pushed the pen faster and faster, until nothing was legible and her hand hurt. She wrote about everything—everything real and unreal, everything she knew and had never heard of. It didn’t cure her, but it gave her a way to deal with all of it, all of those problems. The writing helped, and it was the only solution that she had left. She learned to write to keep on moving, to say what her voice could not, to express what her thoughts didn’t understand. Watching her characters dance out their lives on the notebook pages taught her something, too. People are just puppets, yes, but they hold their own strings. There was a character named Orion. He was a troubled, worried child who lived in a hell that he himself had created. His own mistakes had driven him to the point he stood at—his footsteps, his blindness, his immature and thoughtless decisions had moved him to hopelessness and desperation. There was one named Rebecca, and she was miserable—until she learned the power it was that had made her so miserable, a power within herself that gave her the ability to hear and to perceive with more clarity than ordinary human eyes or ears gave others. Upon learning of her own power she grew wise and so much happier. She was the source of and the answer to her own suffering. There were handfuls of examples and for each, one thing was true: humans control their own destinies. And so: no one could hurt her unless she allowed it. None could tarnish her unless she allowed it. None could touch her unless she was open to the touch. She knew this now. It took many months of writing, many notebooks filled and pens run dry, but eventually she did learn the lesson: malleable, fragile, and imperfect as she was, puppet though she was, she held her own strings. Life would never be perfect—she was not so naïve or so silly as to pretend perfection was even possible. Yet life could get better if she made it better—knowing herself, standing alone, staying sure, and remembering that her destiny rested on her own shoulders. The days went on. |
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A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman
Inspired by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 2003 2166 words |