This essay was originally written in June 2016.
The notepads–you know the ones where pages flip over and over and over, one after the other? Those pages are eager, huddled together, tumultuously being upturned this way and that, each striving to be the next un-blank one. They’re all rambunctious with anticipation. Hey, you! Get in line, wait your turn! There’s a flippin’ queue over here!
For some, the chance doesn’t come.
Notepad after notepad, the lonely, last stragglers don’t live to see the light of day. She–determined yet capricious–runs out of fuel before finishing them, forbidding the ink to flow until the very end.
Those faded blue lines run on and on and on in parallel, begging to bear the weight of her words.
She doesn’t trust them.
Endings have never been her forte, and the flimsy notepad cardboard gives no indication of support. What could she possibly write, that inevitably wouldn’t spill across a thousand blank pages? What epiphany, commentary, reflection wouldn’t swell from her heart to her head and out her fingers through a river of indigo ink, an avalanche of individual words gaining momentum and explosive fury? No, the weight of her words begs to be supported by anthologies, not mere end-pages.
Instead, the last, runt-of-the-litter paper canvases are haphazardly littered with bursts of brevity: to-do lists, one-liners, and reminders. These notes are simple, safe. They carry no emotional valence, because they just can’t withstand that kind of burden.
Don’t be fooled, though. She does write–at length and in great detail–vacillating between meticulously choosing each precious and precise word or letting the story spin itself for a while, an autopilot crochet of letters and spaces. All the black oceans of ink on the planet can hardly support the volume that spills onto page after page. Maybe tomorrow she’ll take a dip into the waters of Europa, a frozen, foreign land, and melt the unforgiving ice with her ideas.
And those notepads–you know the ones where pages are soaked with her life stories? Those are her anthologies: her fears, her hardships, her joys, her love. Those notepads–save for the last few pages–throb with her being and essence.
But do not mistake length for completeness. There are simply no endings. None.
Yet try she does! A self-proclaimed perfectionist, she attempts to pin the thought strings down, to package them into tidy, rectangular, black boxes of paragraphs. A wrapped-up present of the present, perhaps even of the past.
But never of the future.
It’s a heavy toll to think ahead, to philosophize a possible ending for a current story, and her heart and her head and her fingers won’t have it. But most of all, the pages–you know the ones that flip over and over and are soaking and dripping with well-thought-out ink? They won’t have it either, because she does not let them. Endings are not her forte, and she’s never able to–