“The perfect goodbye is only the sum the moments you’ve shared until that point. No final words or tender affection will undo years of horrible treatment or enhance years of cherished memories. It is how we live and love each other — that is the goodbye.”
Tess closed her laptop and sank her face into her hands.
Why is writing so fucking difficult? Why is everything I write so smarmy?
She sighed. The afternoon seemed prepossessing, perfect actually, from her small apartment window. A spring wind was kicking around some dead leaves across a patchy yard. Some fat robins bobbed around in the new shoots of bright green grass, presumably feasting on something small and wriggling.
Another day of empty words. Of writing going nowhere.
She bit at her cuticle. She needed to stop doing that.
I need a beer.
Tess swung open the refrigerator door and grabbed the cold brown bottle by the neck.
Pop. Clatter. Pour. Swig. The first sip bit at her cheeks. She loved that feeling.
Is this why all writers are alcoholics?
She thought about Wilde sipping on absinthe or Hemingway’s frozen fingers as he delighted in a dry martini. She thought about her writing and how no amount of alcohol would ever make her words dance quite the way theirs did. Another swig.
Her closed laptop stared up at her reminding her all of the times it remained closed on her desk.
Death, death, death. For fucks sake Tess, it’s a tired subject so why do you keep writing about it?
She knew the answer. Another sip of beer.
Tess had tried writing about other things. About a marriage gone wrong, about wizards, and detectives, and kids playing hide and seek. But her endings were always centered on death. Close calls, brutal murders, tragic losses. The stories told themselves. She didn’t have a choice. Right? They just weren’t interesting unless — death.
She had even written a poem once, comparing herself to Emily Dickinson. Well, Emily as a person, not as a writer. Both women writers with a questionable preoccupation and morbid fascination with death. Though Tess was fairly certain that Dickinson had far more friends than she. Certainly far more life.
Fuck!
The cuticle she was unwittingly biting tore through tiny capillaries of fresh flesh. Blood leaked from the new wound.
Any sane person would not be a writer by choice which is why all the best authors were and are brilliantly mad.
She wrapped toilet paper around the bleed. She really needed to quit doing this.
What if I’m all mad with no brilliance?
Tess knew that was a likely probability.
But how to fix that? How She needed to push herself. To force death from her pages.
So I did — or at least, she tried.