The Writer (a flash fiction recovered from an elderly notebook)

The writer doesn’t feel that she’s written her masterpiece yet. This is the best possible state of affairs. She actually fears writing the best thing that she’ll ever write for it might ruin her ability to push on into the search for the best writing she can do. For her life has come to revolve around this search.

            Everything that’s ever happened to her, both the good things and the bad, have helped. Every door that’s ever closed, shutting her out of something that she loved, has opened new possibilities of composition. Every good thing that’s ever happened to her has also helped by sustaining hope in a hopeless world too tired to give a shit about its own survival.

            Perhaps she will be one of those writers who pounds away at a typewriter or keyboard for years and years, writing works that never quite live up to her precocious talent and early promise. Perhaps this failure will be her greatest triumph: she will have no babies to kill, no early masterpiece to overcome when despair and alcoholism engulf her later middle age.

            Maybe she’s already written the best thing she’ll ever write but failed to notice. Distracted by the words, she just goes on composing, slashing, hyphenating, and shuffling them into new combinations. Probably being formed into a masterpiece isn’t in their best interest either.

7/14/2015

San Francisco