Why I Write

Why do I write? Sometimes I glance around the room and I see all the people. I imagine what a map of their paths to this exact spot today would look like. And what if it was a timed map, one that Apple created with its newest piece of must-have tech. What time did everyone wake up, and what was the first thing they did? What are they worried about, happy about, scared about? Props to the cartographer that figures that out. We can hardly figure out our own maps. And even that we aren’t too sure of. Do I know why I am irritated that nobody told me about the bedhead that happens when you cut your hair short? About that way that high school guys’ hand-clap greeting annoys me when it makes them stop in front of me in a wet hallway? About how I miss the way everyone in my family wants to take charge and how we joust each other until the winner gets to decide if we’re putting nuts in the cookies?

There’s no way to know any of that, really, and so I’m always amazed when I look around a room. Every person has a million little details like that running through their minds, the things that keep them up five minutes later than they want to at night. The girl sitting across from you might have a boyfriend who is also fifteen years old and they are sure they are going to get married. They have no idea that even fifteen-year-olds in the fifteen hundreds felt this way and even though they got married earlier back then, most didn’t get married. And the truly mind-boggling thing is: even though her mother and her advanced nineteen-year-old friends have told her this, she still doesn’t believe it. Maybe she remembers her grandparents, who met at fifteen and died like the couple in The Notebook, while she’s making out with her boyfriend in the hall.

And then what about that girl’s teacher, whose teaching is honestly boring, which is surprising since she is so young and dresses like a trendy, not-boring teacher. Then you think you know everything about the teacher until you see her talking to a very handsome man on a motorcycle behind the school, and you try to keep your head down. And maybe you’re on a bus and you see a bus driver who looks much happier than a bus-driver should be because he has a two-year-old daughter who is always slobbering over a pile of cheerios when he gets home. The next day when you see him, he might not be so happy but you don’t know that his wife lost her part-time job as a hairdresser. So now he has to work the night shift for the second time in a year, and the slobbering two-year-old is probably going to be asleep when he gets home.

Your head could pivot to an old woman who never notices people’s eye color because she is always thinking about the book she just read, and how she wished she would have had the money to go to college. Don’t start about how she could have gone to community college, because she knows it too, but she doesn’t want to get shown up by a cocky eighteen-year-old who doesn’t have the beginning symptoms of dementia. And then you see a boy with curly black-brown hair who is definitely a little pudgy and you judge him about that. But you don’t know that he started college two months ago and didn’t think about how much he would miss the sound of his little brothers’ drum practice. So he buys cheap cookies at the discount store after class.

And who knows if the grocery bagger, who you wrote about last Thursday afternoon because you saw the interesting pin on his uniform, won’t thank God that somebody actually noticed that he goes to socialist meetings twice a week (the same ones he’s gone to since Mr. Magen’s tenth-grade history class). And maybe he’ll wonder if this piece could convince his friend the bus-driver to work one less night a week and come too. And then the bus driver will say yes, and the pair will somehow end up at a dirty drive-through parking lot sipping marshmallow milkshakes and crying about the diagnosis the two-year-old got a week ago from the oncologist. And they will not forget that moment, and the bus driver will remember it in ten years when his daughter is graduating from elementary school, and he is sitting in the audience crying for the second time in his life. And that’s why I write. All these people, with stories waiting to be told and reworked and remastered. And I could be the one to tell them.