A Piece by Sarah Macolino

Autobiographer, An Excerpt

Waiting with your pen and your yellow legal pad for the words of your life to catch up to you.

With a sigh, you realize that they have slipped away already and you throw your pen to some place lost and your paper to the side. You rise from your bench and walk down the road (slightly dusty because it hasn't rained much). You give a little cough because your asthma feels as though it wants to rise above its medicated subservience. You hear a hum as though a bus is coming up behind you and you scurry crookedly to the side of the road, but there is no bus.

How did you get here? You were all set to become the most successful autobiographer on the book market today. You set out from college with a smile, a slight limp from a rugby injury, and a degree in English. You set up an attic room that you were sure would soon fill with your copious notes, as did the garrets of all true writers. You knew that as soon as you lay down for sleep, words would crowd your mind until they exploded from your fingers in a flurry of typewriter keys. The pages would pile until you wept with what you wrote.

Then, as you lay on your cot – because all writers have cots in their garrets – you realized something terrible and shattering.

You don't know how to write an autobiography.

You waited with slightly shaken confidence for something to occur, as it always had before. At the end of three days, you coughed a little bit and left your chilly garret for the warmth of the sunshine and the hustle of human bodies flowing along the heated pavement outside your building. You got a cup of coffee at the next café over and waited a bit nervously, staring at the blank paper, which, so inviting before, now seems to hold something hopeless.

And you waited there, in that café, for something to happen so that you could write the story of your life.

Now you have left your pad behind and you wander aimlessly, thinking detachedly of your garret, so artistic and so meaningless. You love to write, you've always known that, but you've overlooked your lack of story and now look where you are. Your coffee-saturated stomach lining groans and sloshes, your writing muscles are slack and rubbery with disuse.