There are always deadlines. Deadlines everywhere, demanding incessantly, pleading, cajoling, forcing, both self-imposed and pressed on from without. They stare at you. Constantly.
This is what the life of a writer is like.
I am pounding away at the keyboard, half of me present, half of me lost in the lack of sleep from last night and the change in consciousness writing always presses upon me. There are so many words and sometimes they make sense, and sometimes they don’t, and my job is to distinguish between them, to cull the herd.
I am typing and dreaming and elsewhere and when my boyfriend walks in I almost don’t recognize him. In two years we will be married and in ten years we will have our first child. It will be a boy with black hair, and then two years later we will have a girl with black hair. My mother will cluck with disappointment because neither of them will look like her, but my mother-in-law will be pleased. They will be brilliant in my eyes, whether they are or not. I will teach them to read and they will ask to read what I have written and I will tell them when they are older. They will grow up fine and strong and my writing will be average and consistent. Nothing will sell and the New Yorker will keep sending back rejection letters. It is not until I am forty-four, the same age as my mother when she divorced my father, that I will start writing marvelously. There will be this sudden sick certainty of mediocrity in everything I’ve written in the past, and I’ll feel real fear again. My husband and children will wonder if I’ve gone insane, and the answer will be probably, but I will tell them that genius borders madness. My children will go to college and I will be left with beautiful stories and a husband who is unsure what to do with me, but loves me anyway. At fifty, I will come to my senses, and try resubmitting work, and be widely published. But I know none of this yet, because I am fighting with deadlines twenty-five years beforehand.
My boyfriend sets down a cup of tea on my desk and I barely glance at him. “Thank you,” I say, and he nods, glancing over my shoulder. Now I glare and he grins and moves away. Writing is sacred and cannot be interrupted. However, the tea is sweet and good and soothing.
This will be the same tea that I sip at my mother’s deathbed, watching her in the hospital. Like her own mother, she will go quickly, with a leukemia that seizes all of her vital systems and devours them. She is old; there is nothing we can do. My husband will stand at my side, a warm, comforting hand on my shoulder. Our daughter’s children will come to visit that day, but they will be too late to see their great-grandmother off. They will, however, have tea with me and try to comfort me, but I will also know in my heart that I will be the next one in line. I will take this truth with a small grain of comfort because I hope that in my death my writing will be immortalized. For a moment I will wish I had chosen to die like Sylvia Plath, but I will be glad that my work will not be overanalyzed to reflect so sharply on my life.
I set my tea down on my desk and wonder that if I had a more dramatic name, would it make my work sell better? Is it worth it to cater to public appetite or to create art for the sake of art? Which is more important, truth or eating?
I cannot stop watching the clock. Time is fleeting. The hand circles the center like a vulture, but never lands. My first teaching job will be like this, the first day of class. I will stare at the clock far more than the students, because there are sixty eyes staring at me, sixty feet shuffling impatiently, thirty pencils tapping in irritation, and I will barely be able to stammer out my name. Every time a book is dropped, I will jump, startled. My skirt will itch and my nylons will catch on everything, and by the time the day is done, the nylons will have shredded and the skirt will have been discarded in favor of the pants in the car. After the first day, nothing will be worth it to me to go back, but with sweet cajoling, my husband, despite my tears, will insist it will get better. He will be right, of course, but I won’t want to believe it.
I shut my eyes and lean my face down on the keyboard. So much writing and so little meaning. Where is the grand scheme of life in my stories? Where is the joy that overwhelms, the sorrow that leaves no eyes dry? Where is the soul and the heart and the art, the art I strive to reach and always fall short of? Where is the God in my stories? Where is the humanity?
The air from the window is crisp and chilly, filled with the scents of fall. It’s making my nose run. I gather a blanket off my bed beside my desk and drape it over my lap. It was a day with weather like this that my boyfriend first told me that he loved me, when we were walking together to classes through the piles of leaves in campus. I can remember exactly how it was, the shy expression of his face, the worry in the corner of his eyes, and I remember how I took his hand and pulled him to me and kissed him firmly, decisively, and told him yes, that I loved him too, and in that moment I knew I couldn’t bear to be without him. Because it’s fifty years too early, I don’t know yet that I never will be.
I finish the tea. It’s getting cold. The sun is long behind the trees. My eyes are dry and sleepy. I watch the clock a moment more and it flashes to 12:01. I have missed my deadline for today.
But there is always tomorrow.