Perhaps in cooking with your mother, or father if he was the cook, you had days when you didn't quite have a recipe. You were just winging it...putting in ingredients and hoping the result was something palatable. You find an onion, carrots, celery, chicken, and when you hold them up for inspection and raise an eyebrow as if to ask "should we use this?" the response might be "yeah, put that in there...it'll add flavor" or color or substance or... The same is becoming true for me in writing, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. Things happen in life--wonderful things and horrible things. Funny and terrifying things. Mundane and monumental things. I used to go through them. I used to endure or enjoy them. Now, however, with the eye of a writer, I contemplate them. I raise an eyebrow and wonder "how is this adding color and flavor to my life...and how can I speak that into my work?" I tell my students that all good writing is authors bleeding onto paper. If they aren't bleeding it isn't real. But things sometimes get too real.
My friend died today. It was stupid and tragic and unexplainable. I hate that it happened and I hate that I can't do anything about it. I think of her children. Her husband. I watch my friends and my own children weeping at her loss. I cry myself, again and again, until I wonder if there are any tears left. And yet, I know there are. There are always tears left. I have known sorrow before. I will know it again--just as I will also know joy again. So does that fact diminish this experience? Perhaps it feels that way in the moment. Perhaps when we hurt profoundly or love profoundly we want it to be singular and unrepeatable. For me, sometimes, the only way to make it real and singular and unrepeatable is to bleed it onto paper. Put it in the soup. Let it simmer and see what it becomes. Experiences, good and bad, create who we are and shape how we see and express the world. I have been changed by knowing my friend. And now I have been changed by her passing. And this experience will shape how I write and what I think. It will mellow with the other flavors and colors and become part of me. And so, in the end, she will always be there. Not goodbye, Jamie... just, until we meet again...
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Wendy Picard GorhamWendy lives and works in the midst of words everyday--English teacher by profession, and writer by passion! Archives
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