It is January. The streets tonight are slick with the fresh, cold rain that fell all day. In the flickering light of a sixty-year-old street lamp outside the local library, I stood and stared at the water forming in a large puddle behind my parked car. I saw dazzling reflections surrounded by darkness, the zig-zag of yellow light moving on the surface, a few dark leaves, like forgotten promises from fall, still floating there, and nothing of my own reflection. It was cold. I needed to go inside and return to my work. The rain began to fall again, pelting the top of my hood, like tiny fingers tapping. It was time to draw my eyes away from that dark mirror in the back parking lot, from the ever-widening ripples, the fizzle of heat on water. Hope is like that, isn't it? You don't always see your own eyes peering back at you, but in the stormy-wet mess left at your feet, in the confusing patterns of ever-moving light and dark, there can be a kind of beauty.
I am going into the library to write. It is the pattern by which I live. I slog through all the responsibilities of my day until I can get to the library door, to the house of books, stacks of dusty and new, or those long rows that flow from forgotten to memorable, to dearly beloved. I have discovered books here that I once took to my bed as a child, with an apple and a fake cough, missing school in order to enter their worlds. And I have located books that aided me in my lengthy searches for historical information that fuels my novels and scripts. Most importantly, I have found refuge in a certain carrel that works likes the blinders on a horse, helping me to stay focussed on the work at hand, while still allowing me the occasional glimpse to my left out the narrow window.
In summer, this window affords me a most entrancing view of an enclosed garden tenderly cared for by one of the older, Indian librarians. I've seen her moving there in her bright sari, clipping and pruning like a red and gold flower amongst the lesser blossoms. In autumn it is awash with the loss of all those leaves and petals, and by winter it is stoked to the top of the stone wall with snow, its bushes crouching like small animals hunkered under all that white. Tonight the garden is dark. I can see nothing but the black panes reflected back at me, my chair pushed out with my coat draped over the back and the sweep of my hair, the side of my face. I am looking and all I see is a girl who is a woman who is a girl who just wants to succeed.
She is willing to bend her whole life to the goal of writing. She's been doing it since she was five and first dictated a story to her Russian grandmother, then signed her own name at the top. She's been doing it every day, in some form, from that day forth to this one, whether it's observing the world around her, like that puddle gathering in the dip of the asphalt behind that house of books, or words gathered out of the books themselves, or even just the gathering of meaning and experience from the rhetoric of life.
Life...her marriage is slowly shifting away into failure, endless arguments and bi-polar rages, a husband both troubled and troubling, children frightened and needing, and she is the one who must hold it all together. She tries. She really tries. And she returns each chance she gets to her seat in the carrel, because it is by these words she carefully places on the page that a life can be built for others, not just her own family (so desperately needing), but the lives of those who might sit in a theater one day, digging down for the popcorn,while their eyes look up, aglow, or curling up on a bed with a good book, taking that bite from their own apple, and surrendering to the magic. Is it arrogant to hope she might create magic for others? Or is it simply her call.
Strife surrounds her. She is tired of "Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent." She is pressing hard for change.
To drive from her house, whose walls vibrate with discontent, to the quiet interior of her book-lined place--is a straight route. Sometimes the road is under construction, pot holes widened by winter storms, orange cones pointing out the new obstacle course, officers pink-cheeked in the cold, directing the flow around...always around. There were days she had to take five different turns simply to go a few miles and get back to her carrel. Other days certain sections had been restored and the path was faster. To write a few chapters could take a year if you divide those chapters by the time spent helping her husband in and out of psych wards, or the tears spent on his relentless rages and repentances.
Leave. Stay. Leave. Stay.
The kids want what is familiar, even if what is familiar is the racket of sorrow.
She wants to hope that love can be restored, like the ink on an ancient manuscript.
He wants her to make the magic happen in the library so that he can be released from his workhouse woes. He will read her stories in an hour and ask for more...it took her nearly a lifetime to write them and more frustration and trouble than he will ever realize.
She is not complaining. She is trying to adjust her eyes in the dark. To see who is looking down into the gathered water in a hole she must step over or around.
Who is this girl? This woman? This writer?
The library door shuts and opens behind her because she is determined to find out.
