Listen to the author reading this piece:
I’m home now, buried in blue-lit Word documents and a Discord tab that has tiny little rectangle icons representing the only people who really understand me. Every Thursday like clockwork, we meet over video chat to write. Tonight, it’s just me, Nina, Erin, and Wyatt. We’re here to sacrifice some time to the muses, to place our emotions out on the laundry line to bleach in the sun, to light incense to the only thing that makes us feel alive. Someone—I can’t remember who—starts the timer.
[I am here, and I am unraveling. I am remembering.]
I see you under the moonlight. You are cold and awake and alive. It flutters in my chest, icy and slick and fragile. You forgot to call your grandparents and now they’re mad, unaware that the phone works both ways. They’re the ones who can remember not having a phone in the house. Our neighbors yell at each other and I thank a God I no longer believe in that I haven’t woven myself to a man that yells. We go outside and look at the moon. You still look cold and awake and alive. We touch the ice, slick and fragile, that has accumulated like a giant anthill on the nearby bush. It’s only when I touch you because you’re in the way that I realize that you’re never the first to let go. In a garden level apartment, I feel like a Hobbit, tucked inside a hidey-hole, except the chill still leaks in through the cracks in the windows and the floor freezes my toes because there’s nothing to separate me from the cold hard ground when I fall. You buy roses at the grocery store, something we can’t afford but it’s almost Valentine’s Day and it’s a damn shame without them. I try to picture my life six months from now and for the first time it doesn’t seize my heart with anxiety. I’ve never been the relaxed type, but for the past nine months I’ve been riding the waves, learning how to surf on terrain I’ve long forgotten. Sometimes my skin longs for summer, and I gaze out my winter window letting in the yellow sun and remember when it was, thinking of how sooner than I can blink, this green will be covered in white again. There are so many terrible things about life, so many that I can pull them out like the hairs on my head. But for some reason I can’t remember them now; maybe that’s for the best. Am I healing? What was it? The writing, the rest, the time away, or the thirty dollars a week I pay to a woman who has me look at moving fractals and listen to calming noises? Maybe all of the above. I worry that now that I’m no longer actively mentally ill that I won’t be able to make good art anymore. How sick is that?
[Stop backspacing, that’s breaking the flow.]
Except it’s moments like this that I know it might not ever leave me. I sit neck-deep in the bath while incense fills the room and I try [and fail] not to think of the past. We don’t yell at each other but that doesn’t mean hurt doesn’t fill the space between us once a moon and threaten to drown all the peace we’ve scrounged up like crumbs beneath couch cushions. My cat sits on my legs and she warms me up, begging for affection but not like that. Am I happy? It feels stupid to ask questions like that but I don’t know. It’s only now that I feel calm for the first time in my life. It’s still all fucked though, the world and work and the kids are not all right but hey what can you do about it? You go home and you do drugs and watch tv and stare at your phone and it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. Balance, right? Right. Wrong.
[Maybe. You’re not sure.]
You’re just glad it all doesn’t feel awful the way it did six months ago and that you don’t spiral at the first trip over a proverbial stone. You’re glad you don’t take that stone and beat yourself with it. All those Bible stories of stoning the adulterous woman must have gone to your head. Are you going numb? Losing that edge that made you cool and different? Oh hell, you were never cool. That’s for one thing. I breathe, aware of my own ribcage, the meaty machine it is. I breathe, conscious of my tongue on my teeth and my stomach pushing against my jeans. Will I be able to fit into the clothes from last summer? How embarrassing is that.
[You’re getting into your head again, thinking about the writing, writing about the thinking.]
When’s the timer going to go off? God knows you can’t let anybody read this. The Watching Watcher, The Evil Editing Eye is back, and she’s crawling up your back, rotting your brain. You read and read and read and it’s never enough. But your therapist always tells you to have grace, be kind to yourself. Is this being kind to myself?
[Sometimes— yes— no— maybe.]
It was earlier, but you’re getting lost. Can you get lost on the page? Where is this going? That publishing mindset’s gonna cut your head off, turn your eyes black with an ink you can’t wash out. Because it’s about getting happy or whatever Stephen King said. Maybe I should read a writing craft book, that always puts me back in the mood. Are writing craft books just smut for writers? The opposite of writer’s cock block? This is insane, absolute nonsense.
[But hey, that’s the good stuff.]
My fingers hurt a bit from all this typing and I think I might know how Nina feels sometimes. But God does it feel good, to just let it all hang out again. That’s the good thing about nonfiction sometimes; the point is for it to all hang out, to emulate the feeling of thought, the thoughts of feeling, the senses that stick to you like summer sweat, winter snow. The brief kiss of memory, clinging, clinging, lingering. I can’t believe it’s only been seventeen minutes. God, I think too much. A motor-mouth mile-a-minute kinda gal.
That sock I mended earlier today draws the attention of my wiggling toes—an imperfection, a scar, a hole no more. I fill it with gold and my teeth hurt. I wrap myself in warm light, thinking that might protect me from the monsters that live above my ceiling. I’m determined to write for this whole time, or at least most of it. I challenge my students to write for the whole duration, but of course they struggle with it. I struggle with it. Keeping the flow going is hard labor; it’s so much easier to let it trickle to a stop. It’s so easy to doom scroll, to get angry, to forget.
[Forget.]
But when time is money and money is consumption, remembering feels like the sweetest crime of all. I want to reread the books on my shelves I haven’t reread in years, just to remember something, even if the memory has long turned bitter. I’ve kept them here this long, even though I haven’t read them in almost ten years now. Ten years? Where does it all go? I’m still seventeen, duh.
[Thank God I’m not nineteen or twenty-two anymore. That shit sucked.]
Whenever I think I’ve found myself, rock bottom gives way to a new cavern lined with teeth and gemstones. I’m certain I’ve written something like that a million times in my life. See what I did there? Hyperbole, that’s a literary device that you probably learned in school that means “an over exaggeration for dramatic effect.” Did it work? Did I do the thing?
[Dear God please tell me the effect worked or I’m completely worthless and should totally just give up you stupid piece of shit.]
Damn girl, I thought you got all this garbage out in that Substack post you wrote earlier. Nah, that was just the pants-on, lights-on version, this is Not-Safe-For-Work After Hours, anything goes, baby. It’s 8:23 p.m. now and I feel like I’m one of my students, waiting for the bell to ring and for it all to be over. I remember reading somewhere that there are somatic nerve endings in our lips that help us regulate our nervous system. Where the hell did that come from?
[Ah, I got a taste of my lemon lip balm I put on earlier.]
Now I’m thinking about Erin’s lemon sweater and how I wanted to say how cute it was but the moment never came up and now it’s gone and I feel awkward about it. But isn’t that the point? To be awkward, cringe, authentic in a way that this world tries to beat out of us. Unashamed, unabashed, teeth bared, hair wild. Something rotten, something remembered. I breathe, in and out. Do I feel any better, or have I pushed myself too far? Am I fishing for scraps now, licking the bottom of the barrel, hungry for something I can only give to myself?
[Well, that’s that.]
Olivia J. Bennett is an author and freelance editor. As a Scholastic Gold Medalist and Pushcart Prize Nominee, Olivia primarily writes genre-bending horror, fantasy, science fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her writing has recently appeared in Outrageous Fortune, The Wandering Angel, FLARE Magazine, The Anti-Misogyny Club and more. When not creating, Olivia is usually baking cookies, watching Naruto or Lost with her partner, or cuddling her two cats. She can be found somewhere between the corn and the big blue sky of Illinois.
Discover more about Olivia’s writing:
@olivia.j.creates || bit.ly/oliviajbennett || oliviajcreates.substack.com