Archives and Absences
The week my first Curbside column went live, I wanted to throw up. I’d written it weeks before publication but the actual day of writing is a blank. All I know is that “Between Two States” was written on July 24th, very quickly, and it wasn’t very good. In fact, after writing it, I deleted the document immediately. Then, on July 25th, I went into my Trash and retrieved it, starting the laborious process of editing and re-writing it again.
Thank God we live and write in the 21st century, where melodramatics are technologically acted out, and can be undone with the click of a button. If I’d torn up the manuscript in person, I’d have shredded it, and then, being fundamentally a pessimist, it’s likely that I would have concluded that the scraps could not possibly be glued back together. I’d have descended into a rabbit hole of anxiety the next day, tried to start a new piece, and failed - at which point the destroyed manuscript would have attained mythical status, convincing me that it must have been worth a fig, or at any rate, worth more than anything I’d write henceforth, and then, very seriously, I’d contemplate throwing in the towel, my failures on the page reflecting my failures in possibly all of life.
Much of the last four months have been lost to a haze of panic, and this melodrama is yet another symptom of my recent unsteadiness. In the past, writing was an oasis, now it has become a mirror in the desert of my inadequacies. Today, the act of sitting down before a computer, and staring at a blank page, frightens me, sickens me. The words emerge but I have to coax and negotiate with them, and when they finally appear in full, they display themselves bashful and deformed, already half-turning away at my disappointment. Then I wrestle with them again. The once-fluid dance with words has become aerobic; it is so all-consuming that often when I log off in the evenings, I find it hard to remember what exactly it was that I did for the day.
This momentary amnesia is troubling - I remember a past where I’d go to sleep with the day’s words buzzing in my mind. But months flit by with no change and I wonder if this is the proverbial new normal. The day of July 24th was no different. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember anything about that day. Although I’d found myself relying increasingly on technology, it was determined to be unhelpful. I pulled up my Google Maps timeline in an effort at reconstruction. It informed me that I hadn’t left my room, my apartment. My calendar was empty too - the only event scheduled was a recurring notification for an old HIIT class at my now-defunct gym in New York. Something must have happened on that day, I had the words to prove it. But in my memory and in my digital archives, all that remained was a big, blank space.
The No Contact editors had approached me in July with regards to writing a column for the magazine. Just 800 words. I was flattered but also terrified. I hadn’t written anything new in months. What could I possibly have to say? I said yes. Then I thought about deleting the message because it is technologically possible to do that. But my yes had already been seen, and a deletion would be cowardly and disappointing. There are some things you cannot delete, like another person’s memory of your assent. Besides, I reasoned, a hard deadline would be helpful, and if nothing else, my fear of disappointing others would ensure that I had at least 800 new words a week. A pittance! But not nothing.
However, a thing I had not anticipated was the precipice of weekliness. For years, I ferreted away my words in secret, pushing back self-imposed deadlines for submissions, quietly admiring Twitter-broadcasts from writers each time they sent work out, but archiving my own half-completed drafts. I was perpetually stuck in the editing stage, frustrated at the chasm between where I was and where I wanted to be. The idea of my work existing in the world without my trigger finger on the delete button made me feel physically sick, and after agreeing to the column, I kept feeling as if I had made a big mistake.
But that’s the thing about deadlines, they nudge you, gently, firmly, out of the nest. A thing is due when a thing is due, whether or not it lives up to the ghost of your expectations. The only thing to do was to soldier on. When the first week’s column launched, I scanned it quickly, unfamiliarly, with a small, private grief. There it was, free-floating with my hands off the controls. I turned away, and began dredging up the collisions of the week for each subsequent piece.
Now, a month after Curbside’s launch, the reckless flavor of weekly accountability remains. Every day my pessimism spirals, buoyed only by technological fasteners that preserve expunged drafts in case of future regret, which is nearly always imminent. But technology can only do so much, it braces but does not generate. The gaps are still mine to fill. And unbelievably, I do. I think of the writer’s adage: Endure. It transpires that my path, at least for now, is not a straight and uphill journey: it is a breaking and coming together, a breaking and coming together. Giving up and getting up, over and over, and showing up regardless, each Monday.
