Write Life

Sometimes, when I left your apartment, I liked to leave you notes and poems.  I can’t know for sure what these small acts meant to you but I can only hope they meant to you what they would have meant to me: a lot.  I do know that you kept the notes and poems.  I know because I would sometimes find them sitting atop your dresser, sometimes on the floor, sometimes tucked in your drawers between your clothes along with the journal I gave you when you told me you wanted to get back to writing.  You only ever wrote on the first two pages.  When I asked you about this, you said you realized that that part of your life – the writing life – is over.

I used to awaken in the middle of the night, startled by the sound of you shouting somewhat incoherently about forms and contracts and accounts.  I would shake you awake.  I would tell you your work was giving you night terrors.  I would tell you to breathe.  And you always seemed angry with me but I told myself that maybe you were embarrassed.  And I wondered what it is like to feel so stressed and so stubbornly alone in the stress while believing that the writing part of your life is behind you.  I wonder what else there is.