The pain hits after, minutes after I disconnect the call. Minutes after the artificial cheeriness dissipates into the empty space around me. The tears are yet to come. In that liminal space between a soft grief and heightened disappointment is a moment of intense clarity.
What I am involved in is a passion project, one that requires no one but me and possibly an editor for hire. The clarity is startling. This will be a book of essays, not a chronological statement of facts. It will be pontification. It will be nostalgia. It will be a lot of telling and a lot less showing. It will be all that I want it to be.
It feels freeing. This relief from having to tether my needs to gatekeepers. My book can be twenty thousand words if that is all I feel like is enough to tell the story I want to tell. It can be more. It can be less. It can be an anthology. It can be novella.
The sadness hits a little later. That feeling of being let down by someone you thought you knew well. It was not the “no” as much as the discomfort getting it out. Today, I will mourn the loss of yet another avenue. I will let the tears come. I will feel the blues.
Tomorrow, I will pick myself up. I will sort through my essays. I will collate them. I will write new ones. I will create a new story. One that stars me. It will be the story in which I have a redemptive arc. It will be the one in which I win. It will be because I will publish that book. The one that has been in my head upwards of a decade.
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