Prompt 107: The Internet is a Megalopolis

Well, another eight months have gone by since my last prompt, and I'm not exactly sure why it's taken me so long to write again. There is the baby, of course, there is always the baby, who is now a walking, talking, goofing, hugging, occasional-tantrum-throwing toddler. There was our gradual move from dense loud Brooklyn to the spacious silence of Western Mass. There have been other consuming projects, too — for instance, I'm nearing the end of a third (?) draft of my second novel. But I think, when you get right down to it, none of these were factors, not really. I think I write these letters not because I feel I ought to, or because I feel you need me to, but because I need to. Because some idea is buzzing around in me, and I need to pin it down, for instance; or because I'm feeling far away from people; or because I am feeling very small amidst the vastness of the world and/or the internet.

Today, I guess, happens to be one of those occasions.

I published a story last week in The Rumpus. It's called "What Wasn't." It's about death and love and sharing a loved one's grief, and the irresistibility of trying to imagine how a terminally ill person's life might have gone, had they been lucky enough to escape the illness that killed them. It's a story that is deeply personal and important to me — more so, in fact, than any of my other published stories — and it took a long time to get it out into the world, onto a website where (theoretically, anyway) anyone can read it. 

If you're not a writer or in the writing world, let me give you a sense of the painfully glacial pace at which these things tend to move. I started working on the story in October 2020, after the death of my husband's father. I shared an early draft with my writing group in late November. After getting notes from those first readers, I embarked on the revision process. I tend to revise in fits and spurts, often as a distraction from other projects that have stalled, say, or become emotionally or intellectual unwieldy. At the time I was working simultaneously on my second novel and a longform personal essay about reckoning with identity in early motherhood (still unpublished). 

So it was five months later, in April 2021, that I felt "What Wasn't" was more or less ready to send out. I submitted it to two publications from whom I'd received kind rejections in the past, and requests to see more work. Both passed on it. I sent it to another publication in May, and to another in June. Getting antsy, I submitted it to two more publications in July, including The Rumpus, which accepted it seven days after receipt, to my delight and relief. The assigned editor would turn out to be an absolute dream to work with, but did not have the bandwidth to begin working with me on edits until three months later. We finalized a draft in late October, and it was published a month later, during Thanksgiving Week, illustrated with original artwork. By the time it was released into the world, more than thirteen months had passed since the death of my husband's dad — whose memory, to me, is the heart of the story. 

The internet is like this infinite, overcrowded, capitalist megalopolis. There are bazillions of people here, all of them hungry, many of them talking — yelling, even — constantly! There are many thousands of corporations, and there are scams, big and small, from well-strategized corporate pyramid schemes to sly little con jobs. Just the other day a friend of mine, up here in the hill towns, sent a screen-grab of an ad she'd been served. The image was what looked like a candid photo of a minor 90s movie star. The caption reported — speciously, of course — that this movie star had left Hollywood to settle down right here, in our small town. There must have been a wee wicked location-tracking bug embedded in the ad code. God only knows what would have happened if my friend had clicked on it. Her personal information might well have been gobbled up by Russian bots. The streets of this megalopolis are crawling with filthy gobbling bots! Meanwhile, tucked away in a relatively quiet corner of this jam-packed, deafening landscape, TheRumpus.net is like some nice little out-of-the-way Bay Area café. A quick web traffic check reveals that it gets approximately 32 site visits per day. For a small, independent web journal, that's actually not too shabby. But how many of those kind visitors chose to sit down and spend twelve minutes reading my 3600-word story? From texts and Twitter messages I received after I shared it, I know of exactly five.

Look, I know I'm not exactly in a position to complain. I live a life that is devoted to the people and activities I love, namely my family and close friends, writing and teaching, and otherwise working with words. I am proud of this short story, I respect the publication that accepted and published it, and I had a beautiful experience working with the editor who took it on. In the grand scheme of things, I am grateful. And yet? Sometimes it's hard not to feel like not much more than earnest little carnival barker, begging passersby to read my mad pamphlets, on a remote street corner in some depraved, congested neighborhood, deep in the neglected digital underbelly of an apathetic universe. 

But that's just how it is, now, isn't it.

Here's what I tell myself to cheer myself up about it all. I say, maybe, someday, the story will end up in a book. And maybe because the book will be an object of substance, an object one can hold — and dog-ear the pages of, and, once in a while, fall asleep with — it will feel realer, more enduring, and more meaningful. The kind of love that we naturally invest in physical objects, I'm convinced, is a very different kind of love than that which we are able to invest in abstractions. It's older. More innate. I witness it in my toddler, the way he latches on to various physical items in his small, ordered world. These are his comfort objects: A pacifier with a pig attached to it. A doll in a bear suit. A counting book, a couple of Sandra Boynton books, our decades-old, spine-dented copy of Goodnight Moon. The moon itself, for that matter — which, this morning, was just a glowing sliver hovering among the bare black branches of the forest — and which he named, looking up and pointing, in his imprecise and perfect baby voice: "Moon. Moon."

Your prompt, this time around, is to make something real. Something that can be held and handled. It's the holidays, right? So maybe make someone a gift. Or, if you're feeling like you need a comfort object of your own, right now, maybe go ahead and make it for yourself. Maybe it will be a letter, handwritten in differently colored inks. Maybe it will be a journal, sewn together with thick thread. Maybe it will be an embroidered companion, stuffed with cotton. I don't know. If you do choose to make something, though, take a picture of it. Send it to me. Let me know. 

Yours, 
Rachel