Two months out

Here’s what it’s like:  it’s like a hole cut out of my life.  Ten weeks I didn’t live, because actually living means happy hour at the bar with friends on Friday nights and obsessively trying to know everything about current Colorado politics, walking the dog at dawn even when it’s 17 degrees and washing dishes while Sean dries.  What papers over that autumn gap is a picture book of exotic places and dramatic emotions, and not a very good one, since the plot wanders and there’s no resolution.

Here’s what it’s like: an elaborate fraud.  One of my fellow Fellows, one usually based in New York, posted a story on Facebook today.  From Bangalore.  How weird, I thought, that for a minute we were equals in a program and now I’m back writing stories about a change to agricultural tax exemptions and he’s reporting on swamis in India.  And yet it also feels like the natural way of things.  At the time I thought I was getting a glimpse of the road not taken, but really, it was just a mad, short dash down the road I was never really on.

Here’s what it’s like: frustrating as hell.  Because while I don’t feel savvy enough to think I’d last long covering militias in Nigeria or talented enough for anyone to ship me off to India to mingle with holy protesters, it does feel suddenly much more possible that one could live cheaply, on savings, in some challengingly exotic locale and report the quirky little pieces I feel most comfortable with and never, ever have to write another story about redistricting.  And never mind those days when I was too homesick to leave the house and buried my longing inside endless books; on those days I was very sure I wasn’t cut out for the expatriate’s life.  But on those days I still wasn’t writing about redistricting.

Here’s what it’s like: it’s forgettable.  Really, days go by when I don’t think about it.  And it was just two months ago.  That kind of freaks me out.

Here’s what it’s like: repeated little kicks in the shin.  Does it surprise you to hear that my story, my main story but  also the one that I only really got onto my last days in the country and so is, I know, built on weak foundations, was turned down by the Washington Post today?  Now to shop it again, and again, and then take it out behind the woodpile and shoot it.

I hope someday I’ll be nicer to myself and not see grand experiences as failures simply for refusing to create impossible transformations.  Right now though, I’ve been reading a lot of Richard Yates, which feels very right without actually helping anything.  A line from Richard Russo’s introduction to his collected stories seems appropriate in this case: “…the cruelest promise of democracy is that anybody can be anything.  All men may be created equal, but they become unequal in a heartbeat.”

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