Manuscripts Don't Burn

You’re right WolandSatanBulgakov.

still from the “Lazy Eye” music video by Silversun Pickups

I’ve come to be in relationship with a defective Alphasmart Neo2. Every so often I find out about something that gives me the idea it will cure a symptom I can’t quite believe can only be solved from within. Typewriters, medication, hair colors and cuts—some of these things have helped, but I discover after a moment or a year that I am still me, just not the version that feels like mememe. Through time and much anguish, I’ve learned to start from my core and work outwards. I have not yet reached the mantle of my soul nor ego. Although I rarely hope an object will change my behavior these days, I was excited about the Alphasmart. My husband told me that I should simply turn the wifi off while I’m writing on my laptop. Though I felt a twinge of he’s right, I came to the conclusion that he just doesn’t understand. 

The Alphasmart is ideal! All I can do is type on it. Well, couldn’t I use one of my two typewriters? Sure and I do. But with Alphasmart, I can upload all of my writing with a USB cord directly to a Google doc. And what about pen and paper? I can’t read my handwriting. I journal often, but that’s emotional vomit. Sometimes, I burn the page afterwards—magic. 

I’ve gotten off track. I’m professing my hopelove for this Alphasmart and trying to convince myself that it was a worthwhile purchase. I believe it was. However. The device I received had a battery leakage. I discovered this one morning when I came to Neo2 after a midnight bout of writing I liked and saw an error message. All of my writing was gone. The eBay seller agreed to send me another Alphasmart, but in the meantime, I tried to get the defective Neo2 to work for me. Suddenly, I couldn’t write without it. Another familiar problem. Oh well. I cleaned the leakage—my husband did. It worked sporadically. I couldn’t guess when the error message of erasure would appear. That was part of the temporary fun of it. And so, I wrote the following essay. 

This is like creating art out of sand. It will be gone soon. I will not swipe my hand at the design, nor will I get on my hands and knees, lower my chin to the ground, and blow—sending both a wish and an offering into the late autumn breeze.

I came home from the Silversun Pickups concert last night and wrote about the circular, yet linear, the all things nature of time on the one month anniversary of granny’s departure. 

I had once laid across granny’s bed avoiding getting dressed for the first days of freshman year at East Coweta High School watching MTV when MTV still played music videos in the morning or at all. “Lazy Eye” was my awakening, in more ways than one I realize now—I’ll let you mull over that, if you wish. The melody has become the sound of my self and of nostalgia.

Then, now, there I stood listening to the opening notes, looking at the bassist and the lights bouncing off of the disco ball at the Buckhead Theatre as my vision became clouded by salt water. I was there. Here I am. I had her. Now I don’t. I once watched art on a screen, in a book, and now I’m in the physical. My life is becoming, without her, and because of this lack, every light, the smoke I inhale involuntarily, the man swinging his shoulders, everything is like nectar and technicolor. 

I liked what I wrote while I was in the mood of the moment. I went to bed, deciding that I’d transfer the text in the morning. The Alphasmart hadn’t betrayed me. 

Technology, especially old technology— scratch that— technology is not reliable. Especially when the user is not reliable and doesn’t back things up. 

Nothing is reliable. Do you feel the quickening, the heat building? My cheeks flush. Here we go. A paper could burn. The body asleep, the romance of the index and middle finger delicately holding a cigarette with a burgundy lipstick stain around the tip, matching the burgundy stiletto nails. The cigarette falls from the sleeper. It takes a moment for the paper to ignite but when it does, it spreads and all is lost. Or there is a fire from the angry sky. A lightning bolt hits a pine, the pine cracks in half. Hear it? CRACK. Crack…..crack. There’s a blaze through the trunk. Half of the tree falls on the house. Actually, on the study where the body sleeps. At least she can’t be blamed for the cigarette because there will be no way of knowing what caused the blaze when everything is ashes. You could knock over a cup of water with your elbow and smear the ink of the first page of your novel. Trying to save it with a paper towel, your desperate dabbing hands, will only worsen the ink leaking away from letters. The hard drive may be crushed beneath a tire. The second hard drive could be swallowed by a possessed garbage truck gone rogue, coming for you, in revenge for what you made it eat. A cloud may fall out of the sky, consuming every word from your repressed mind in a reverse storm, opening its great metaphorical mouth, whisking it away to where? You will never ever know. Until. A meteor may land on your computer. Not you. Just the laptop. A perfectly rectangular 13-inch meteorite, aligning with your macbook when it lands—almost satisfying, entirely satisfying if it wasn’t your possession. A whale might swallow your phone, in which you wrote a note to yourself that contained the perfect sentence. An angel may ascend from hell and wipe the memory of an idea for a story from your momentarily lit up, sharp, wild brain. A murderer could creep behind you in the dead of day, hold a can of dry shampoo to your mouth and force you to delete the story you’ve been sporadically working on since the year after college graduation when you still had hope that you’d get it together, that things would happen for you. That sound of the plane that makes you cower each day may very well be the danger you thought it was—goodbye to all that. Write on the sole of the shoe. Try that. Make sure you don’t step in the puddle, though it is alluring, so tempting. Whisper the story into the ear of a gifted child. That child has a good memory for now, but they will become insecure and develop perfectionistic qualities when they reach middle school. They will lose themselves, and of course, your story. The spark of it may remain though. Twenty, maybe thirty years later, the spark will return to them and feel like something that is a remnant of their truest, most creative selves. They will stop and start and stop and start until they reach old age, when the earth is only fire or water and oral storytelling is the only reprieve. Pass this down—the tale of the woman who wants to love and be loved by tornados. One day, when the earth recovers and there’s a new version of humanity, that story will become a myth, then a religion, a myth again, and once more, a tyrannical religion. What would the story have been like if you had fleshed it out, completed it? Oh well. It can still be told. No two stories are the same. The details don’t matter. Not the perspective. Nor the mindset of the generation from which you can’t escape. The characters may alter. The story may be scrambled and retold and reimagined from a futuristic setting in which the protagonist is a sexbot. There’s the soul of the story that can’t be altered, not by you, author, not by anyone. Scream your story into the earth as you dig your feet into mud. Let the bugs suck at your toes so they may absorb the plot, too. Claw at a mushroom as you speak of longing that has gone unchanged all of your life. You’re a storyteller. The story returns to the earth. To the star system yet discovered by sapiens. To the collective unconscious. It came from where it came from.