I’d like a running tally on how many words I write daily. I’d put the number, ballpark, at around 5000. A standard novel runs around 60-70K words. Q.E.D.: If I put this kind of effort toward actually writing a novel, I’d have one done in about two weeks.
My mother is finally converting all her old WordPerfect files (sigh) to Word. In the process, she’s come across poems and short stories (and screenplays and novellas) I wrote as a young teenager and figured I would never see again. I had no idea she’d been porting them from computer to computer over the course of the past 15 years. She emailed them all to me tonight. I haven’t read them all, not even close; I haven’t even read the entirety of a single one. It’s not something I’m ready to do emotionally, even though these were fictional pieces. (Yes, at one point I knew how to write fiction, apparently.) I’ve scanned them, though, and it’s strange to get insight into 13-year-old me. She is captured perfectly in those pieces, like a body in an ice block. She is articulate and she is brilliant and she is fearless and she is terrified. She is gone today, and I can’t fix her. I couldn’t do anything to help her then and I can’t do anything to help her today. She just had to survive those years, and I wasn’t there to hold her hand through it, and I feel somehow like I should have been. But she did just that — she barreled through her share of this life, perhaps the roughest leg of the relay, and she came through relatively unscathed. I am proud of her.
I ran a blog back in those years, too. No one called it a blog back then. No one called it anything. Most people made no regular use of the Internet. But, as a 13-year-old, I hand-coded a website called The Sweetest Cherry (I had no concept of the sexual implications) using basic HTML (we didn’t have WYSIWYG web dev tools back then, or CSS or XML) and hosted it somewhere or other (Lord knows where) and invited people to submit poems and stories inspired by Tori Amos. It was phenomenally successful — my mom says she has hundreds of pages of submissions. I remember that the site was written up in several magazines, but I can’t remember where or why or how. I don’t remember why or when I stopped running the site. I don’t remember what it looked like, or what the URL was, or what the content looked like. I’ve completely blocked out most of those years. “You know,” said my mother, “you were running a blog fifteen years ago.” And, you know, I kind of was. Well, 13-year-old me kind of was. I can’t explain how detached and separate I feel from that girl. I am not she and she is not I. We ought to have separate object identifiers. But, again: I’m proud of her.
There’s something that’s been lost in the transition. There was a raw and creative and limitless force inside this girl. I don’t know what fueled it, but I know it was hurting her. And somewhere along the way, somehow, one of us made a decision. We decided to trade. We decided to mute this force and all that came with it in exchange for a life we felt we could live in. Was that her decision? Was it mine? Was it right? Was it fair? To her? To me? I want to find her and hug her, to dress her wounds and explain it all to her. To apologize for not being there. To bring her a message of faith in words she could understand. To tell her it will all be okay, and to tell her how proud I am of her and grateful I am for what she’s done for me.
