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In short, I’d wandered into this encounter the way you wander into a dark room: with one hand outstretched, feeling your way as you go, unable to see what’s on the walls or how exactly you might get out.
All I know about writing is you sit down and write, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, the words come.
“So,” Professor Connelly said, looking around the room. Everyone was waiting, their pens poised above their notebooks, unsure what, if anything, we should be writing down. “What can I teach you? I can teach you to be honest, to tell the truth, to look at the things you’re afraid to see. To not be afraid of what your friends will think or what your parents will think, to peel away the bullshit and see things for what they are. To find moral clarity in your work and in your life.”
I did it slowly and carefully, as though I were running my hand through his underwear drawer.
He wrote about wanting so desperately for it all to be over and then, when it was, his shame at having wished it. It was exactly how I had felt when my mother died, but I’d never told anyone because it felt wrong.
So many of my happy memories were like this, it seemed, blotted out by the shadow of disease and decay.
I’d successfully “charted the emotional landscape of the story,” he said and, the way he described it, that was all I was interested in as a writer or a reader anyway: what people said and did and what they thought about when they weren’t saying or doing anything. Girls with feelings.
We may not know everything about this narrator, but we know enough. She doesn’t need to tell the reader everything. She respects us enough to let us figure it out for ourselves.
“what resonates is the question of what we owe our parents and what it means to step fully into our own lives, to decide what we want beyond what they have offered us. So despite the story’s flaws, at its heart is a question that is meaningful and true, and what else do we want out of literature anyway?”
The language didn’t soar, but it was real. It was true. That’s the kind of story I want to read, one I can’t stop thinking about, one that crawls inside me. Takes up residence.”
IT was mild the night of the Senior Mingle. There was a hint of spring in the air, soft and fragrant like a promise.
There was something elegant about her, graceful and feline, as if her intelligence had been transmuted into a physical attribute.
Later, I would understand that I didn’t owe Andy an apology or anything else. He had a right to be mad at me, and I didn’t have to care or try to fix it—I couldn’t fix it. He was mad for reasons that had far more to do with him than with me. But I didn’t know that yet, so I kept trying to explain myself.
I was surprised at how easily the barrier between us was breached, that the lines I thought existed were really nothing at all.
He kissed me and I went liquid. The room was cold and dark, but inside I was fire, heat, blue, blue flame. He kissed me and I was awake. He kissed me and I was alive.
I’d never been scuba diving, but I imagined this was how it felt to rise from the deep.
I told him I’d never thought I could be an artist like her because the ways we perceived the world were fundamentally different: she saw things with her
eyes while I felt them through the thin skin of my heart.
He covered my mouth as I cried out, and I no longer knew what was inside me, only that I never again found a door I couldn’t open. He held the key to my undoing, and I let him undo everything.
My mother had been dead three weeks and we were wobbly, like a table missing a leg.
I wanted—no, I needed—the security that came from knowing how I was going to make that month’s rent. I was my mother’s daughter, yes, but Abe Rosen was my dad.
