If my mouth wasn’t taped up for sleep, I would have screamed. I was in bed, enjoying the morning breeze before the sun was fully up, bright and high, reading Rioghnach Robinson’s novel Bad Words.
Let me share the passage that got me. I immediately sat up and grabbed my pink pen to leave a note in the margin. “The book and its characters do not worship at the same altars,” said novelist Juliette Liao, in conversation with one of the book’s main characters. “If there is any divinity on earth, I don’t think it comes from the eternal; it comes from the ephemeral.”
Serendipity strikes again.
Earlier this week, I was wondering what life would feel like if we could give a running commentary on the goings-on in our day-to-day, the way the margins of my books bleed with those thoughts written in pink ink. But we already do, the more I think about it. Last week ephemeral was to revisit, this week, it’s a live, breathing, conscious stream of conversation between friends.
I’m in several long distance relationships, mostly platonic but all incredibly fulfilling. Including the relationship you and I are building here. I’m coming back to myself as a writer, and you’re bearing witness to that, reading the vindicating evidence.
There is always an undercurrent of conversation. Good or bad. I’ve sent voice notes from the treadmill and the tub, TikToks, and jokes between some of the happiest but also saddest moments in my life, not unlike the notes I’m leaving in the margins.
I like to think that I am currently reading my friends’ works-in-progress (their lives) and they are reading mine. Actively and concurrently.
I won’t spoil the book, Bad Words, but there is something to be said about someone who can read your work and somehow discover your innards, whether you splay them out on the page or not. And maybe that’s what I like about being in constant conversation. The underlying subtext that people who really see you just hear. And what’s more vindicating than that?
p.s. For the Brown Sugar fans among us, there are multiple scenes in the book where each writer quotes the other’s words back to them, without the one quoted knowing the quoter even read that piece. There is a little bit of You’ve Got Mail in there too but I don’t want to spoil how or why.
