on writing

I used to love writing. Unlike my siblings, I liked to write even when it wasn’t for homework. They liked to watch TV and I’d lay on the carpet with a spiral notebook and my little collection of gel pens. I wouldn’t look up from the notebook, I’d just keep writing whatever words I heard. Buy now. Tune in. Moesha returns. Car jackers. And again at ten. I got it at Ross. But, Uncle Jesse…

Then college happened and that excitement faded. The other students wrote either awkward autobiographical pieces about their outcast high school experiences or else made up stories set in low-income areas with heros that chose to drop out of high school for artistic reasons, like spray painting the neighborhood. All the stories used big words, words you learn in SAT prep courses. I began to keep track of how long it took someone to say “juxtapose.”

There was also that pervey old, almost-dead professor who hasn’t changed his syllabus since the seventies. The one who is so moved by a piece he assigned that he tears up in the first seminar. The one who tells all the girls with cleavage and a smile to come meet him and work towards getting published, always mentioning his friends at the New York Times. His attempts to prove his intentions by assigning weekly readings of Xeroxed copies of op-eds and book reviews that always ended with the bio saying, So and So, a student at Sarah Lawrence College. But in those private confrences it was only because, “You are that good.” Then you arrive and after a while his hand is on your knew and you want to close your eyes and pretend you never applied to this stupid liberal arts college that the college counselors said you couldn’t get into. But then it’s over, the hour is up and the conference meeting is over and you can leave. You can make up an excuse for the next week and the one after that. And suddenly all the assignments you turn in are “state school material” and that’s exactly where you wish you were. Where you are just a student number, no longer a name or a face or a knee or cleavage.