Violet cardigan: Uniqlo. T-shirt: "Two Man Enter, One Man Leave," Threadless. Maroon corduroy skirt: American Eagle, secondhand. Navy blue tights: Nordstrom. Brown oxfords: Payless.Today, I am angry.
W1L 002: Write one leaf about how you came to find “write one leaf.”
Honestly? On her second go, she thought the prompt was just as dumb and self-serving as on her first, only this time she added “masturbatory” to the list because she had heard others use the word to describe A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and couldn’t help but consider that perhaps it was voyeuristic appeal that drew her to the book. Could you call it a list if it consisted of only two items, though? Could you ever refer to “having a go” without adopting an upper-crust English accent? Why did Snape have such greasy hair?
The truth was, she had told the truth the first time and had given herself hell for it. After all, what did it matter what she felt? Why should she matter? Why was her obsessive desire to document everything so that she might be able to look back at it and see the pieces falling into place driving her toward their inevitable climax, why was that worth anything to anyone? Wasn’t there something ignoble about wanting to unthink the thoughts she had thought, to unfeel the feels she had felt, to undeal the cards she was dealt? Wasn’t there something ignoble about unnecessary rhyme? Wasn’t there something ignoble about ending two paragraphs in a row with a series of questions? Wasn’t there something ignoble about an unexamined past?
She was embarrassed for having cried alone on the floor of her living room like some oversized, emotionally unstable man-baby who had difficulty relating to other men. Or really a woman-baby who had difficulty relating to men period. Or a lady-baby. Yes, that was good, a lady-baby. But she was more uneasy than surprised, because she knew then that her mission, should she choose to accept it, would probably leave her battered and bloodied and imperceptibly but irreversibly changed, and that she would probably find herself crouched on the floor like a lady-baby again, more than once, crying, alone.
But a lady-baby’s gotta do what a lady-baby’s gotta do, and so she told them the truth. She had no idea how she’d found Write One Leaf, but it was something like a slow-burning itch of the variety you put off scratching because you know that once you start you will never ever ever stop and you will suddenly become aware of how itchy everything else is and you will scratch and scratch and claw until you break skin and bleed – something like that that compelled her to search, one night, for writing prompts.
And maybe she was lying to herself, but she had just wanted to remember what it felt like to be a father’s daughter and a big brother’s little sister and God fucking dammit fucking fuck fuck if she could remember how the fuck was she supposed to remember anything other than the enormously heavy seven-year-old feeling of being wronged by the entire world, which conspired to take away her father and give her stuffed animals and innumerable I’m always here if you want to talks in return? She wanted a past, dammit. One that wouldn’t make her eyes watery when adult men were nice to her, that she could pull out occasionally and dust off and gaze at softly and mentally sigh and feel a weak and irresistible longing for, and if it meant beating the shit out of her feelings and stuffing them down a sewer grate after stealing their jewelry and gold teeth, then she was going to do it and have jewelry and gold teeth to pull out and dust off and mentally sigh over when she felt like it.
And she fucking got it. Bitches didn't even know what hit 'em.
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