Every Day is Marne Gras

this is about writing instead and feeling sad instead (written a few weeks ago? feeling less morose now).  we will return to our regularly scheduled programming of cancer cancer cancer shortly.

The minute you are confronted with the actual advice, the moment you sit down to actually try to do what you know you need to do to get what you want, is the hardest moment of your life repeated over and over again.  Every day you don’t go to the gym or read ten pages in The Yiddish Policeman’s Unit, practice piano, call your mother, is another reminder that you are a failure and the only thing that’s really keeping you from brilliance and everlasting glory is your own dullness, your lack of drive, the absence of any vision.

You strip away the commitment of a job or a relationship and your time appears before you no longer in easily segmented blocks that disappear regretlessly with tasks like ‘laundry’ and ‘potluck’ and ‘wash girlfriend’s hair’ but rather as massive swathes with no end.  Your time is an animal in a trap that needs to be put out of its misery every day.  Sitting on your bedroom floor, scrolling through your cell phone contacts for the umpteenth time, you are only aware of how you’re squandering your time like your phone battery life.

Tomorrow will be different, tomorrow you will have some errands to run.  Tomorrow you will have a job interview.  Tomorrow you’ll definitely write for at least two hours and you edit at least one story.  Tomorrow will not end like today, when you sat on the couch, watching the sun roll down into the clouds, reading the same sentence in your library book over and over again, wondering if it was possible that something interesting might happen to you after your dinner so you don’t wind up going to bed at 8:30 because you have nothing else to do.

You get a postcard from your favorite author that says ‘write every day’ so you start to and then you realize that you don’t write every day because you don’t have very much to say and what you do say is poorly written in run-on sentences and you are constantly frustrated by your vocabulary (not enough words) and the English language and you need both to be so much bigger but you never worked very hard on that and you complain better than you do most anything else, really.

You begin to realize that the messages you wish to convey in your stories are as muddled and half thought out as everything else in your twenty what year old life is because you don’t know what anything means for yourself, the world, whatever right now, so when you try to write a story about love or loss or friendship or life you lose what you were trying to say three pages in.  When you write about yourself, you do it with a voice that suggests you have no idea what any of these humorous anecdotes with family will mean later on, as if your sixth birthday has some greater meaning that you have not yet divined.  This trips you up and makes you self conscious and you stumble and stutter over yourself and you can’t make yourself write a simple little story about a girl whose mother threw her a sixth birthday party in a hair salon during her long phase of being petrified of haircuts.

All you can write about with any assurance is feeling lonely and sometimes feeling numb, because these are the only feelings you have felt with any certainty.  As you are writing you realize you are jealous of one of your college girlfriends who studied writing, wrote short stories about being gay and fat, who had felt and sorrow and shame and acceptance and love so wholly that she wrote damn good short stories about those feelings with certain endings and conscious meaning.  She had things to say about bodies and her stories about the two of you make you cry but you never told her because she didn’t let you read her stories, you just found them on the floor next to her bed once when she let you sleep in late in her room when she had an early class.

You try your hand at fiction, but you can’t figure out why anyone would make up stories and write them down.  You only write about what happens to you and you only make up the bits you don’t remember that well or the bits that need a little making up.  You realize you don’t write fiction or good endings to your stories about yourself because you are obsessed with finding universal meaning in everything you write, yet you are constantly paralyzed by the idea that there is very little meaning in anything.

It’s 9:30.  You can legitimately sleep now.