Pitzchu v'Ranenu v'Zimru (Break forth in song, rejoice and sing praises)
The cursor
blinked at Nina, mocking her, digging deeper cuts into her chest as she stared
at her computer. Her mind was frighteningly blank.
It had been
barren for weeks. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, only that every
single time she sat down to try her hand at writing something, anything –
nothing would come. It was as if the fountain deep inside her, the one that was
the source of all her stories and ideas, the one that used to overflow with
possibilities, had been shut off. The only sound filling the empty space of her
office was the music playing in the background, the soft guitar licks the only
thing keeping her from going completely crazed.
Her phone
rang, startling her out of her stupor, and when she answered it, the clipped
voice of Alison, her agent, came through the line.
“Nina.” She
sighed.
“I know, I
know. I’m working on something now. Or, trying to.”
“Your
deadline was three weeks ago.” That was all Alison needed to say for the shame
to settle in the cracks in Nina’s chest. It was also the third consecutive
deadline she had missed.
“I’m
sorry,” was all she could say without her voice threatening to crack. Something
in her gut told her that this was more than just writer’s block, that it wasn’t
going to go away, but she could barely admit that to herself. How could she
possibly admit it to Alison?
Alison
sighed over the line.
“I can give
you one more week.”
“Thanks,”
Nina said, and hung up, blinking tears out of her eyes. Her fingers moved over
her keyboard, forced into action by Alison’s call. Christine McVie’s voice sang
in her ear, encouraging her further, and she tried to tell herself that she
would figure something out.
The sun winked down from a bright blue sky,
and I thought it was hardly appropriate weather for an unveiling ceremony.
Nina made a noise of frustration, and
deleted the sentence. Way too predictable, writers use ironies like that all
the damn time. Again.
Snow fell in thick clumps from the sky,
beginning its slow coat of the frosty earth.
The
keyboard clacked violently as Nina struck the new sentence from the document.
Nothing happened, it was too boring – it wouldn’t grasp and clutch onto any
reader’s attention the way a first sentence needed to. Something else entirely
was needed.
The roar of the crowd shakes Day’s bones as
the team makes its way onto the ice for the first game of the season.
Nina let
out a long groan and collapsed on her crossed arms, pressing down on the G key
by accident. Nobody was interested in a short story about a woman’s hockey
team, she wasn’t kidding herself. A full page and a half were wasted by the
time she finally looked up, her eyes flat and heart heavy. Lindsay Buckingham’s
voice was now reminding her that tomorrow would soon be here, and Nina stood
up, sick of torturing herself. Lindsay was right, she could make another
attempt again tomorrow. She clicked the little red X in the corner of the
document, not bothering to save it, and shut the computer. Her fingers were
itching to get back on her new guitar, anyway.
Nina picked up her phone and sent
of texts to a couple of friends. Hopefully they could play for a few hours, and
Nina would wake up in the morning with a clear head and renewed fingers.
If
anything, it was worse the next day.
Nina could
barely concentrate on the Word document, despite her favorite pump up pop music
blasting through the speakers. She forced her tired fingers over the keys,
fiddled with them for a moment, before typing.
When Sarah saw her mother’s name on the
screen of her vibrating phone, her stomach clenched.
Nina shook
her head and ran her hands through her hair, already aggravated. She could see
where this story was headed the second that sentence was typed – she’d written
it a hundred times already. Sad queer family drama with a side dose of romance.
She was sick of sad queers, and her agent, Alison, was sick of queers all
together, Nina knew.
“Where’s your creativity?” she
would say, waving the bland sheets of story in her face. “You’ve got it, I know
you do, so start showing me some of it again.”
Nina was fairly certain if she kept
giving her the same story repackaged with different characters, she would be
dropped. The scariest part of that thought was not the fact that she would be
losing her job; she bartended nightly and had a part time secretarial job at a
big name law firm, affording rent wouldn’t be the issue. No, the most terrifying
part of potentially being dropped by her agent was that as she thought about
it, the more it seemed like a good thing.
Nina jabbed
at the backspace key in desperation, hoping the force of it would inspire some
kind of passion in her. She was good at writing, at least when she had ideas.
The first story she ever wrote was a sequel to Charlotte’s Web in the first grade, and she hadn’t stopped writing
until now. It was the only thing she really knew how to do, and the fact that
she wasn’t writing anything, couldn’t write anything, was uncharted territory. She
couldn’t think about it, just had to press forward. Over the speakers, Nicki Minaj
was rapping and Nina tried to listen to her, drew in a deep breath before
setting her fingers down again. She was a queen, she could conquer this damn
blank page.
Erin Twohy, newscaster for WKN Evening News,
Channel 6, stared at the teleprompter, completely silent despite the red on-air
light blinking in her eyes.
Nina
swallowed and deleted that one as quickly as possible. It felt like the start
of something far too similar to her current predicament, and she had always
been a firm believer in not writing stories that were secretly about herself.
There was a reason she wrote fiction.
She stood
up, shook out her arms and did a few jumping jacks, trying to clear her head.
The sound of electronic pop music switched to the opening chords of Babs’
iconic Funny Girl song – maybe
something triumphant would help. If Fanny Brice could do it, so could she.
I woke up with the scratch in the back of my
throat that warned of vocal rest, and my body sagged further into the sheets,
sinking with my
Something shuttered
inside Nina and she stopped typing, suddenly very still. She turned off the
music, closed out of the document, and shut down her computer, every limb
fighting to work against gravity. Her boots were snug around her feet when she
put them on, but she grabbed her house keys, slamming the door behind her as
she left her apartment.
Nina
shivered, both from the cold and the nagging feeling that her life was all
wrong. As she walked down the sidewalks of the Upper East Side, she tried to
remember the last time she wrote something she was one hundred percent
satisfied with, the last time wrote something fulfilling, the last time she
wrote something that actually made her feel good.
She
couldn’t. This was more than just writer’s block. Nina knew that the second she
realized that even the idea of not being able to play guitar, or sing, for
whatever ridiculous reason – she had laryngitis, or she broke a finger typing
too hard, something – the thought that she might not be able to be so
intimately involved with music had her breathing hard and tears pricking at her
eyes, made her feel like she might pass out if she didn’t get her music fix.
She needed to get out of the house and think for a long, long while.
She jogged
down the steps to the 5 train, not sure yet where she was heading, but not
really bothered. A saxophonist was busking in the station (Billy Joel, it
sounded like), soulful and sad, and Nina dug in her pants pockets to see if she
could find any change. A five dollar bill and a quarter came up and she tossed
them into the case at his feet. He nodded towards her in thanks, and she smiled
before swiping her Metrocard and jumping on the next train.
It was
crowded with tourists, presumably leaving the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
Nina was left grabbing for the metal handbar above her head. The sea of people
surrounding her and the movement of the car jostled her as the train sped
along, and she held on for her life as her body and her brain threatened to
spill to the ground.
The last
ten years of her life were flashing through her mind and it was fucking with
her, badly. Thoughts and images were all jumbled up in her head but as she was
knocked around by the press of other bodies, felt the rumble of the train
beneath her feet, saw the walls of the subway tunnels flashing by, they started
to click together -she realized with sudden clarity that writing had felt less
like a necessity and more like a chore for a few years now. Every time she sent
a new story to Alison, it felt like she was filling a quota that had been set
for her. Seven stories for each singular piece that was picked up, and only in
one of ten publications to which it was sent. It was tiresome, and when she
could finally hand off the stories, it was as though a weight was being removed
from her stomach. Relief. That was what she felt.
She shouldn’t feel like that about
her writing. When she started out with her agent, she had been so damn excited to
get her words, her precious words, sent to print. The first story that she published was
probably still the piece she loved more than anything else she had ever written.
It was a story told from the point of view of a piece of music in the process
of being composed, and it was glorious. Each sentence had been so carefully
constructed, each word carefully chosen, to communicate just so how music could
heal and free and instill joy in people and – oh.
The train stopped at Union Square,
and Nina got off, needed to breathe air other than dank subway station oxygen
and the carbon dioxide of strangers.
God. She was twenty-nine, it was
far too early for her to be questioning everything about herself and what she
had spent most of her life doing. But here she was, feeling more and more
certain that she couldn’t continue writing. Not when something else had the
potential to make her much happier, even though she wasn’t even sure she was
good enough at that other something.
Nina wandered the streets around
Union Square for nearly an hour, wallowing in self-doubt, until she heard the
claps and strums of a song she knew well. She turned the corner and there was a
young woman, no older than twenty-five, guitar case at her feet, her eyes
closed and playing like there was nothing else in the world that would make her
feel as good as she did in that moment.
Nina was captivated. Her foot
tapped in time with the song and her mouth was opening and then she was singing
with the performer. She couldn’t stop herself, even though she knew singing
along with buskers was considered rude, even though there were people all
around her that would probably stare.
The busker opened her eyes and
instead of telling her to fuck off, smiled and started playing with more vigor.
Nina began clapping as she sang, sinking further into the power of the song,
and before she knew it the busker was drawing to a close. Here she comes, my saving grace, they sang together in harmony.
They had drawn a bit of a crowd and
the more polite passers-by clapped and dropped coins into the case. Some people
were putting away phones, and Nina blushed when she realized they had gotten at
least some of the song on video. Then she flushed deeper and a grin slowly
crept its way across her face as she realized that this feeling was the one she
had been searching for in her writing. Joy bubbled in her stomach, and her
heart fluttered in her chest. It was exhilarating.
The busker stuck out her hand.
“I’m Miriam,” she said. “You’re
really good."
“Thanks.” Nina swelled inside and
the cuts carved into her chest by that stupid blinking cursor were filled with
the joy from her gut and healed over. “You are too.” Gina laughed.
“Well, that’s a relief.” She gestured
vaguely at Nina. “You a musician too?"
The question gave Nina pause. She
only realized that music made her happier than writing over the course of the
last couple of days. And yet.
“I would really love to keep
talking, but I have to go make a phone call. Would you mind waiting around for
a few minutes?” Miriam looked vaguely amused, like she couldn’t believe a
stranger was asking her to wait around. Nina couldn’t believe it either.
“Or you could walk with me, that’s
okay too.” Nina wasn’t actually sure if that was any better, but Miriam said
sure, and she put her guitar in its case, and together they walked around the
corner.
Nina’s feet led her on a path she
had tread hundred of times since she had moved to New York City. She was hardly
surprised when she came to a stop in front of The Strand. The hours she had
passed huddled in some corner of the store reading, the times she had sat down
and actually written something inside the store, were so vivid in her memory,
but somehow felt like they belonged to someone else.
A minute passed and Nina stood at
the window, staring at the books piled on the racks outside, at her reflection
next to Miriam’s in the window, who was looking at her with a soft curiosity, the
more certain she was of what had to be done. She could hear Alison’s voice in
her head, from a conversation they had the second time she missed a deadline.
“Nina, you’re clearly tired. Maybe
you should take a break.” Nina had insisted she was fine, that she was just in
a bit of a slump, that she would have something for her in three weeks. Three
months later, and she was still stuck in the same place, and the only way out
was up and away.
Her hands were dialing the familiar
number before she could second-guess herself, and Alison picked up on the other
end as Nina turned away from The Strand, facing the street.
“Alison, I’m done,” she said,
breathy and nervous. “You don’t need to keep a hawk’s eye on me, you don’t need
to coddle me, I’m done. You don’t have to waste your time on me anymore.”
There was silence for a moment, and
then Alison’s voice came through.
“You know, I’m disappointed. You’re
very talented when you’re producing. But I can’t say that I’m surprised
either.” Nina nodded, though she knew Alison couldn’t see her. “Good luck,
Nina.”
“Thanks.” The call clicked to an
end, and she felt like she could take a real, replenishing breath for the first
time in weeks. She turned to Miriam, breathless and giddy. She was shocked that
she had actually stuck around, but Miriam didn’t seem to be bothered – she was
still staring at her with big doe brown eyes, filled with mild awe.
“I’m not entirely sure what that
was about, but it seemed brave,” she said, and Nina laughed.
“Yeah.” Miriam grinned at her, and
it spurred her on. “That’s also the answer to your question, you know.”
“Sorry?”
“In answer to your question,” Nina
clarified, cheeks flushed with excitement and her voice bright. “Yeah, I am a
musician.”
A vaguely autobiographical story I wrote in my Advanced Fiction class last fall. Hope you enjoyed!
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