right

before

3/22/20 

Nan’s going for her operation tomorrow. A pace-maker.

It’s Mother’s Day in England. Mothering Sunday, they call it. Or we call it. Or something.

When I called Dad’s house to speak to Nan, Lynette said ooh. You just missed them. You could try them in about half an hour, forty-five minutes, at your Nan’s house.

Lynette said the operation would Help Her Breathing. 

She said it’s funny, you know. When she’s outside, she’s fine. It’s just when she’s inside that she tends to puff. She said, she went Up The Church the other day and she was fine. 

Fresh air, I said. It’s good for her.

Mm, right. Lynette replied. 

//

now

4/23/20

The operation did not Help Her Breathing.

It took the breath right out of her.

It gave her back to Grandad.

On the phone, Dad said it happened in the right order, love. It happened in the right order.

/

I am - still.

It has been seventeen days between publishing - if I can even really call it that - and now.

And, as my old friend Charles said - it began as a mistake.

A terrible mistake. An excellent mistake. A happy mistake. The kind of sperm-meets-egg inception that begins as a passionate accident and then metastasizes into something entirely other than what it began as. 

I just wrote because that’s what needed to be done for me, at the time, and then it became a work unto itself. And I knew that it had promise, and I knew that it had value, so I got it up and running - and then Nan died. The pool sparkled away beneath me as Dad said those words. Over the phone. 

Bristled cheek against the landline. T-shirt mucky with age.

And here I was. Here I am. 

And I have a book to show for it. A real one, at that.

B said I should get my coaching cert and Be The Cake and be this … person. But I don’t very much want to be That Person. I want to be This Person - the person who writes, and writes, and writes, like her life depends upon it. 

/

Last night, I ordered some Jack from Postmates and was on the phone with Conor, and then I asked the lady to go back and buy me some cigarettes because I was running low, and so she’d taken off to God-knows-where with my Venmo payment - and no cigarettes to show for it.

So I was angry, and I was drunk, and it was midnight, and so I started off to Quiktrip with Sonny because he needed a walk and - well, I’d spent all day mooning around indoors and I had not spent an adequate amount of my time walking him. 

Matt was standing around in the gravel outside the apartment complex. I’d seen him outside before. I thought he was weird - this dude, this backwards-ball-capped dude, standing there with a Miller Lite, drinking without a cigarette or a phone or any obvious reason to be outside.

I asked if he’d like to take a walk with me. 

And he had said yes.

And I said I was Amy, and he said he was Matt.

And so we walked to Quiktrip.

We drank for a while, by the pool. He was thirty-eight, and he was from West Virginia, and he had the sweetest accent I’d ever heard.

Drunk Amy being Drunk Amy, I pounced on him. 

But he said no. He had a girlfriend, he said, and he wouldn’t, he said.

And he didn’t.

So I guess there are still a few good men in this world.

/

I made a video, edited it and uploaded it - all in the space of a few minutes, earlier. And I did the same thing three times over, over the past day or so.

I want to show people how hard this is. 

What I can't show people is how excruciating it is to write, to write and conceive something so blisteringly awful and so utterly fantastic, and to go from having nothing to having a published novel in 17 grim, gross, nose-to-the-grindstone days.

I beat the life out of myself and now it's time to breathe some life back in. Time to get this flesh lump back up and running.

Or walking, at least.

It's time to get back to basics. Write a bit. Write for me. Write because that's always been the only thing that feels right.