Open Letter to the Guy Who Has Volunteered to Be My Husband

I pity myself a lot. I thrash about, stay in my pajamas all day, let the laundry sit in the washing machine, refill my mug with hot water four or five times until the tea leaves have nothing left to give.

I lie down in the bath and blow bubbles. I stare at a shard of grout becoming dislodged from between the tiles. You ask me what's wrong and I look at you like you're the world's biggest idiot. Same thing that's wrong everyday, duh.

There are a hundred pieces of paper scattered on the floor of the office, each one is covered in ink, codes and symbols that mean something to me. They mean I am a terrible writer. They mean I am a coward. They mean I do not have the language to narrate the trip I took to the moon. How many people get to go to the moon? It should have been a better writer instead of me. "They should have sent a poet," exclaims Jodie Foster to the galaxies laid out before her in that ridiculous movie Contact.

There are pieces missing and, instead of writing them, I twirl the covers around me in bed and make myself into a burrito. I stare at the TV. I spend hours feeling my heart slam into my ribs.

I am obsessed with myself. My self. Self self self self self.

And this morning, when I whimpered, having been denied validation by another literary magazine—when I said, "I can't write a story better than this one"—you went wordlessly to our stacks of books, the ones that we don't have shelves for yet, and flipped through all your editions of Best American Short Stories from the 90s until you found the contributors' notes from Rick Bass and Poe Ballantine, both of whom fell into depressions, each clinging stubbornly to a story that had a fatal flaw in it that he refused to acknowledge and change, unable to fully see that flaw but ever sending it out until an editor illuminated it for him, and saved him.

I can't believe my good luck. You cling stubbornly to me despite my flaws, my insufferable suffering!, but some part of you can see the masterpiece, and trusts me to continue to edit, explore, revise, and append until I am the best version of myself.


Or at least the version that will get us some fucking money.


Thank you for marrying me. I've got your back.

P.P.S.

That's not true. I want to tell you everything, but I don't think I can speak the language.

P.S.

And there are some things I just don't want to tell you.

Not Writing

I'm really lost.

The book is printed out and all over my floor. I was hoping that if I squinted just right, I would see the finished product and know what to do to get there.

And then of course, there's E.L. Doctorow breaking my balls:

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I've come to the devastating conclusion that I may have stopped writing this book a long time ago. All my obsessively making revisions to existing pieces and letting off steam in these blog posts are just me idling the car at a rest stop, using Armor-All wipes to polish it up. I'm stuck here, and I'm sad and angry and I want more fucking time and less fucking jobs and I concede that it will have to wait until after the wedding.

That's not the part that worries me most of all. The part that worries me is: will I be able to remember misery when I am happy? Or will I engage in subterfuge against my own happiness to recreate the misery I need to connect with to write the rest of the book?

I know a lot of mothers and wives have achieved a remarkable balance between writing and living, but I am so far from it, I ache. I physically ache, thinking about a distant future in which I can write fearlessly, freely, and for hours. Do I need to sequester myself to some abby to finish this book, alone and far from the things that make me feel complete?

Or should I just buy some pot?