Time works differently in college. For months, the world moves so fast that it’s ill-advised to look past the next paper, the next race, the next day of classes, because there’s always so much to be done in the moment. Down time is rare, and therefore precious, and therefore shouldn’t be wasted on idle reflection. Past and future fade away and you end up living in a kind of constant present. It’s not a bad thing, exactly, though it takes a little time to get used to. But then the semester ends, you go home to the place you lived before college, in a time you only half remember, and you have enough time to catch your breath and realize that the world is a whole lot bigger, and life a whole lot longer, than college has led you to believe.
That’s a long and probably hyperbolic way of saying that I’ve had a lot of time on my hands this past week, alone at home without much going on. Once the novelty of having time to read, play video games, and sift through my lego collection got old, I started wondering about my future. If I wanted to make it as a writer, I realized that I should probably get serious about finding something to publish. And, since all my most recent work is under lock and key for at least a year, I started searching for anything publishable in the stacks of old writing from high school shoved under my desk.
The best possible outcome would be that I found some piece of polished genius from some forgotten era when I knew all sorts of cool writing tricks that I’d subsequently forgotten. The worst outcome, and the one that I was most prepared for, was that it would all be trash that would make me wonder what the hell I had been up to a few years ago. It turned out not to be either. A couple of the stories were better than I remembered, a whole lot of them were worse, none of them were publishable, and none of them seemed like they were written by me. I mean, sure, I could glance and the title and probably rattle off some vague memory of the plot and a couple key characters, but when I read it slowly, sentence-by-sentence, it didn’t sound like anything I’d ever written or would ever write. The disassociation from my writing got so bad that I even started combing the text for motifs that I didn’t mean to put in, hoping to form it all into some theme I never would have intended.
After a little while, though, I started to wonder if maybe there was some meaning to it all, meaning that I hadn’t put in consciously, but that I had put in all the same. There was one story I wrote in my senior year of high school. It was a phase when I was interested in absurdism without actually understanding any of it, so the characters were all overblown personalities doing nonsensical things for nonsensical reasons. I spent hours trying to decipher what the satire was supposed to be cutting against before realizing that it wasn’t directed at anything at all. The main character was this insufferable twit who never said anything without a handful of unnecessary ACT vocab words tacked on, most of them misused. But there were a handful of times near the end, little more than moments really, where he spoke in standard English to say that this isn’t really him. He’s just putting on a show because everyone around him is putting one on too, and he doesn’t like his role and he doesn’t know when it will end and he just wants to get the hell out.
If you asked me back then why I wrote him like that, I probably wouldn’t have a good answer. Looking through old journals, though, I found out that I wrote at night in hotel rooms after long days of touring prestigious East Coast schools that I doubted I could get into. I think that it was about college applications: how this absurd new world was forcing me to sell myself as some kind of pompous intellectual, when really I just wanted to be the same undefined me that I’d always been.
For any high school seniors reading, I don’t want to give you the impression that college applications are some kind of mind-bending hellscape. I got through them just fine and was happy enough to be one the other side. But still, those feelings were real, even if I don’t remember them anymore. There’s this quote by Gail Carson from a book I read in my middle school creative writing class, “When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you.” The idea is that you should write when you’re young, because it’s the only way to remember what it was like on the other bank once the bridge is burnt. I’d even go a little further and say that we’re always crossing a burning bridge, always changing, never able to remember exactly who we were the day before. Usually I don’t have the time to remember that I have a past to begin with. Which is why I’m glad that I keep on writing, so that there is always some evidence of who I was. It's a little hard to decipher, maybe, but it's always there, under my desk, just in case.
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