back to life, back to reality
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| My actual lunch basket. Ridiculous, I know. |
There’s a writer who was trapped in New York for a week
because of the hurricane, whom I didn’t get to know very well. He said
sarcastically, “Wow, it was great to get to know you so well. All those
late-night chats.” That was not the best kickoff to my last day. I always felt
like I was boring him when we did talk, and I sort of wanted to say, “Late
night chats with me are awesome, dude. Your loss.”
I had a little meltdown last night in the privacy of my
studio. As most of you guys know, I’ve had a hard couple of years. Not
catastrophic, not even bad in many ways. Just hard, at a time when so many of
my peers seem to really be getting their shit together. Many times, I thought, I just want someone to take care of me. And
someone did—multiple someones, multiples times—but what I really wanted was the
total cared-for-ness of childhood.
Here, I sort of got that for three weeks. I didn’t have to
report to work or cook food or even buy food. I didn’t have to wonder who I was
going to hang out with. I just had to write. Writing isn’t easy—there were days
I wrote scenes that made me break down sobbing and days I had no idea how to
fix structural problems—but for once everything else was conspiring to make the
writing as easy as possible. When there were problems, it was someone else’s
job to come up with a solution. Hurricane?
Why don’t you just stay in this beautiful old mansion for the night. Here are
some clean towels and a Wi-Fi password.
Now it’s back to solving my own problems—with help, of
course, albeit help from people who have plenty of their own problems. That’s
how the world works, and how it should be, and I’m dying to cuddle with AK and
Team Gato and see my friends and family. But the part where my only problems
were the ones my characters were having? The part where I got to be my best,
most carefree self instead of my real self? That I’m going to miss for a long
time.
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