How to be a writer: Notes taken from a front lawn conversation

“It is very difficult to be a writer,” remarked the girl in the front seat. I was in the front seat too, though on the passenger side. I always sat in the passenger seat—I couldn't drive. But I also liked to talk loudly and without distraction.

It was midnight and we were in the sticks.

“It’s hard to be a writer,” she repeated, “because you have to be depressed. All the best writers are.” She listed several writers as we sat there, in her car on my front lawn. The best of them were utterly dejected, she said, some enviably so. Their children were killed in freak accidents, their family villages overrun by men with very long beards. Their bosses spat on their faces inexpicably, for hours at a time. They were forced to work past the average retirement age, just to feed their hoard of orphan dogs. Genius was only birthed from hardship she said, of which I had had none. No great tragedy had befallen me, save the products of thoughtful fabrication. I could not be a writer in my current circumstances.

That night I went to sleep with the knowledge that I must, to succeed, legitimately fuck things up.

Here is a person I wish I had seen.

I picked her out that night in a SUPREME flat brim (it was blue and bright), as we piled through the automated doors of the Opera House. She was the kind of person who wore every garment with a certain degree of irony, laughed big-bellied and round at the dinner table, and showed her thimble collection unashamedly to strangers, as readily as she did her oddly shaped areolas.

Frost’s second, diverted (or: Come home, Leelan)

“I wish I could speak words like yours. They float nicely along.” He was drunk that night, but he meant it nonetheless. Things were starting to tug between us, the weight of heavy oceans and seven billion kilometers pulling at our collars.

It was night there, in Paris, when we spoke this time. He was in that old apartment, near the fountain, very high. We had lay in a stuffy room in the 7th district, he and I, and our other compatriot; talked with wrinkled toes and cackled laughter of the improbability that he would actually find somewhere to live. Paris certainly was large, but there were a lot of people who needed a house. Most seemed to actually have jobs. His teeth burst apart when he got the phone call, he mumbled strings of thank you's in broken french. We had all sat there, in this new apartment, and felt the wealth embrace us. Money clearly was no object here, amidst the neatly dusted floorboards. We wondered how long until Lagerfeld would touch him and how much Moet he would drink.

Things were different now, but somehow much the same. He grew infatuated with new faces, new ideas. Paris had swallowed him. He had found new ways to cast the boats of worry away. He thought about words more than before, tossed them gently between fingers; a new yellow ball. He wrote secret lines in scrawled print and read them out to strangers at foreign gatherings. This week was his third.

He was due to come home, due to leave things soon. I would like to think that he had had too much of apple-picking; too much of sight-seeing the same old things. He was full up to his brim, he was pouring out too quickly. It wasn't quite so. He didn’t know quite where he sat in the scheme of things, which place was home, and where to flee from. He only knew people. He knew two, and they waited as the weeks were trampled.

He longed for breeze and lightness and subtlety. I hoped we had it waiting for him.