Shitty First Drafts #3
The murmuration of traffic beyond the line of trees is almost hypnotic as she traces the grain of the worn wood with her fingers and her eyes.
The porch creaks as he crosses the old boards and stands, wordless, behind her.
A breath of wind makes the sparse spring leaves around the deck whisper.
“You’ll get a splinter.” His voice is soft, warm, curling against her ear.
She shrugs. A splinter would be something to feel, at least.
She doesn’t say it. Doesn’t say anything. Continues to trace the sworl of wood, over, around, again.
He sighs softly and his arms circle her waist, his body a solid warmth against hers, his breath in her hair. “I’m sorry, baby.”
She lets her head fall slowly forward, feeling the weight of it on her neck. For a moment words seem ready to rise from within her, but her jaw is too heavy to move, her shoulders sink, the words die, unformed, deep within her, adding their own weight to the heaviness of her belly, her chest, her legs.
Suddenly too heavy to move, her fingers stop their endless tracing and drop to dangle, leaden, over the railing. She considers letting the weight pull her forward, over the edge… and for a moment it beckons her.
He is wrapped around her. A fall would take him, too. She cares about this. She tells herself, this. Again and again. A mantra to make it true.
His arms tighten slightly as if he knows. He is too strong, he wouldn’t fall, and so, neither can she. She realizes that this finally makes her care. Something like grief becomes a pain in her stomach.
She lifts her head with effort, a surge of energy almost allowing her tears, almost giving her words, but then the heaviness returns, and she allows the weight to pull her head backwards this time, against his shoulder.
He sighs again and kisses her temple. “I’m sorry.”
2 Comments
Stephanie
Maybe, just maybe, you should stop calling these posts “Shitty”. I think they’ve been lovely and insightful and not at all shitty. You’d never let your students get away with it. Maybe they should just be “first drafts” and leave it at that…
Shadow
I know… it’s kinda mean, in a way. And I’m failing at it, on top of it. So… I should put this in a post because other people are probably thinking it too, but… the “shitty first drafts” phrase came from a book about writing called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. She’s awesome and hilarious (you might like reading her!), and one of her chapters is called “Shitty First Drafts” and essentially her point is that you have to allow yourself to write something imperfect or else your perfectionism becomes a barrier to ever producing anything. Which is pretty much my entire problem. There is supposed to be a freedom in writing a “shitty first draft” because… it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s not SUPPOSED to be perfect… that’s defeating the whole point of it.
In college, when we were starting our thesis writing, my professor assigned us all a “shitty first draft” of our thesis. It was supposed to be a super rough information dump rough draft. I couldn’t do it. I can’t write something that isn’t perfect the first time. But of course, I can’t ever produce perfection, so… I just produce… nothing.
The “shitty first drafts” I’ve been posting are… not, technically even meeting the standard of a shitty first draft, because, I can’t… which is why I’m so blocked. I end up getting around it by just agonizing over every single word and revising every line in my head six times before I write it (and then usually cheating and rewriting it on the screen a few times). So I’m not doing the rough draft skill I’m supposed to do in order to release my creativity… I’m still being too tight.
And because I’m so tight and have so much anxiety about writing perfectly, I continue to have anxiety and blocks about writing.
Yay.