Mopping Up Eggs
In March 2020, I wrote about how I had one more month of Covid-19 to get through before it could all go back to normal. I was wrong. In a long short, autobiographical piece to become typical of me, in April of 2020 I wrote my first piece for Prose in three years. I pressed publish, hoping beyond hope my pain would be recognized by the internet.
March 2020 was a weird month. Fresh out of a psych unit, broken-hearted, and having quit my job (the first day Covid hit the west coast - Seattle - and I thought, whatever, that's like forever from here, what can happen?) I was rather desolate. My sister had cut ties with me, I had no one but myself and a computer screen.
I wrote a poem about cracking eggs against my frying pan and missing, too drunk to care. My roommate, the only other person I was to have contact with for the next three months, asked: "Do you really only have eggs and champagne in our fridge?"
The answer was yes, and not only was I not ashamed, I wrote about it.
And I started getting published.
This is a flash-forward to 2021. So far this year, I've had three pieces of mine published by various magazines. The are short prose link this. And every time I get published, I think: I've shared too much with the world.
I wrote about my sister, and she didn't even care. I sent her a piece I had published, one where I tore our family to shreds. She didn't blink. Or, at least, through the phone it didn't seem like she did. She said, "You know what? When Kim Kardashian wears a million dollar coat, it catches everyone's attention. She's making a statement."
I'm still thinking that one over.
Why do I write? I write because, as Charlie Sheen says on Two and a Half Men, "There are things inside of me I need to kill."
He actually says that while hugging a toilet on the show, drunk and throwing up, but I digress. Perhaps it's even more relevant to me, then.
I write because the things inside of me I need to kill need names written in ink. I plaster my emotions in print, feeling the weight of it all evaporate.
Even if, only after I write, I stop to consider who my writing could potentially hurt, I feel a freedom in that "publish" button. Who knows who will read my stories, who those people are?
If you've gotten this far, perhaps I've succeeded in at least planting a seed of something in you, and you'll take away from this something that makes you feel okay.