Here I Sit

I recounted to a friend the other day my background with writing. Not the resume, the stories and articles published, the conferences and workshops attended or the awards won, but the whys and wherefores. The ones before my husband told me I should do this thing.

I remembered a writing conference my English teacher took me to in junior high. The teacher, a published writer whose name I’ve long since forgotten, gave us a writing prompt: here I sit. We could take this anywhere. We could look out an imaginary window, describe the room in our head, share why we sat, what we contemplated as we sat. Anything. Here I sit.

This was not the first time I moved pen on paper. I had written before this, which explains why my English teacher chose to take me to the conference (did I win a competition? I don’t remember). Under my belt I had tucked short stories and even one novel written the year before (a murder mystery in which a girl on a sixth-grade class cruise was found dead when the cruise ship made an emergency dock on a deserted island before sinking; let’s not discuss the suspension of belief required to get into a story of sixth graders going on a cruise together as a class–I dreamed big).

But this, these simple words, brought my writing from class cruises and unicorns and whales to something closer to home, something more me. Here I sit, gazing at the world around me, observing how it spins, noting how its people move. No one else can see it exactly the way I see it.

This is not to say that stories of class cruises and unicorns and whales can’t be close to home, can’t describe our world and how it spins, but mine didn’t. Not anymore. They encapsulated the world of a third grader and sixth grader. But in junior high, moving from one state to another, saying goodbye to my entire known existence and discovering that life existed somewhere else, my world had changed, and this prompt gave me the voice to express that.

Now here I sit, chronicling the life changes of humanity, the seven acts and the exits and entrances, the dreams lost and gained, the relationships developed and unraveled, and I always have this, a unique perspective from my chair, in my own little corner in my own little chair.