| The Autobiographer
By Sarah Macolino |
| 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 caf� 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 caf�, 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. As you stumble over the curb and into the park, looking for all the world like a destitute writer, you happen to look up and see a boy slip and bump his way down the slide. He becomes more and more discombobulated, and when his limbs tumble over the lip of the slide, one by one in a torturous tangle, you see that he is terribly deformed. His right foot is twisted inward, and his back hunches like a tiny bell keeper. He walks with a lurch. He is thoroughly repulsive. He lies in a heap, and you can see tears coming from some depth of humanity within the outward monster. There are pushing clouds of dry dust around him, and as they clear away, he begins to struggle to free himself from himself. It is as though you are watching some extinct beast hatch from its membranous cover. As he twists, you are able to see that his face, as well, is deformed � poor surgery has worsened a harelip, and one eye is barely open. There is only a tiny slit where it should be, and salt and water seeps from the crack in a silent prayer of hate to its own existence. Somehow, the creature brings itself upright, where it is even more terrible than before. This is not what a child should be. This is something entirely different. Then, the boy does the very, very last thing that you want it to do � it turns and looks at you. The dust and tears make the face even less attractive, but you cannot look away. You know that your face is transfixed in an expression of horror, but you cannot bring yourself to believe that this boy cares. Can something that looks like that even be human? Then you see. The left eye, the one that is fully open, is looking directly at you. It is a nondescript shade, rather like brown, but possibly green as well. There is sadness in it, and anger, but beyond all that, and underneath the layers of what can be seen on the shimmering surface of the tears, there is a deep and permanent aliveness that seems to take your gaze and hold you. This child is more human than you will ever be, because deep within him, he holds a story that you can never have. Your autobiography would be nothing. His would be something. You feel a deep sense of loss and desperation, and suddenly, a jealousy so powerful that you want to rip out the eye and reach within to the soul of the boy and take his story for your own � a story of tears and agony and sorrow that you have never had and can never understand. He has a story and you have the garret. Couldn't there be something there? But he turns and walks away, and you fall to the ground, your asthma wheezing and your coffee sloshing within you, sobbing and crying because you don't know how to turn an autobiography into a biography even though you left college with an English degree and a beautiful typewriter that cost you $4000. |