(and creative writing assignments)
in a car heading south there is a father and a daughter. the daughter is me and she’s moving and the father is there to help transport boxes, to uproot what he planted up north in a town much smaller than the one down south. both of them are scared, i think, and the daughter is reading a book with a pen in her hand like she always does when life is uncertain. the book is there because books have always been there, a semblance of order and marked pages steady in their rhythm where so many things cannot be counted on as such. the pen is there because she has developed the habit of always reading with ink in her hand, for underlining sentences that strike deep in her core. they go together, she thinks, in that symbolism-seeking way of hers; the book of the reader and the pen of the writer.
the father is good at asking questions and good at sensing the deeper layers of things, so as they are driving down the freeway and the pines turn into birches he releases his hard grip on the steering wheel and let’s out a deep exhale:
why do you always underline certain sentences when you read? how do you decide which ones to mark and which ones to don’t?
the daughter takes her eyes of the book and places it in her lap. the letters of vincent van gogh in light green helvetica against the contrast of her blue jeans. the fathers question tastes strange to her because she has never held it inside before. in her mind the pen moves over the black typeprint almost of its own accord, like the musicians fingertips over the piano or the soccerplayers foot over the ball.
the daughter knows that the dad will understand the latter metaphor better and answer as such. she adds that sometimes a certain set of words are written with such beauty that they need to be returned to. she withholds that for her certain sentences serve as private hymns.
the father answer that he thinks it is admirable, this talent of hers to pick up tones of thought that others simply overlook.
the daughter sits quietly with the words of van gogh in her lap as her gaze travels unseeingly over the pines ceding to the birches, pondering her fathers statement. she has never thought about this before, this relationship of hers to books and pens that feels as natural and fervent to her as she imagines the man who ate the yellow paint felt to his colours and pencils.
& she will spend a long time doing so, this reflecting over reading and writing; art and kinship. so much so that she can offer few answers when prompted by a creative writing assignment. she can list countless writers that she admires (a list that would far exceed the word count of an already exceeded quota), but answering the how and the why of it is a different thing. how can she explain that the sentences that came to her when staring at the blank blinking word-document was the one that started this entire essay? how can she explain the choice of the omniscient third person when she’s not sure that it was she herself that decided to use this voice? words leap up at her and sentences haunt her, a condition the late joan didion wrote of in her transformative essay:
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
the daughter believes herself to be afflicted at birth, afflicted by this strange relationship she has to words. she has never been able to decide which side to place herself on between the age old question of nature versus nurture, but she does believe — like most people do — that certain people are born just as they are and there is no unearthing that mystery.
in a separate timeline the daughter rises from her computer and walks to the overfilled bookcase in her room. she reaches out a pale hand and pulls a spine-cracked and well worn paperback from the shelf. on the front cover is a self portrait of the french-dutch painter she loves so much. as she places the torn and teared book on the desk the pages fall open of their own accord. an underlined sentence springs up at her:
Anyway, it’s not a bad idea for you to want to become an artist, because if one has fire in one, and soul, one can’t keep stifling them — one would rather burn than suffocate. What’s inside must get out.
to not stifle what wants to get out. the daughter does not know a better answer than this. although she wishes she had one — because she wants to answer the questions better — the ones poised by her father and her assignment. but in the moment she has no better reply than this, this substitute string of words underlined in faded black ink.
the last sentences that come to her before closing down her computer are these:
she writes in order to not suffocate the voice wanting to get out.
she writes to keep the fire of her own soul burning.
