I Do Not Know How To Finish

I am not a finisher.

I was engaged for six years without ever once trying on a wedding dress.

I have a tendency in my creative process to ride the high of a good idea. Ideas are my safe space. Here, critique is rarely generated, and I can thrive on the possibility of creating something if I had the luxury of time and money.

Really, I could.

I get so caught up in riding this wave that a former partner of mine used to keep a running notes app of all my great ideas, so charmed by how quickly I generated the next best thing. When the reality hit that I would never follow through on any of these, the list became a sign of my neglect, not my genius.

I published the story "No Kings" on November 7, 2022.

7 people have read it.

I entered it in a contest, something about dragons and fantasy. It was an attempt to squeeze lore from my youthful loins, and what resulted was a bastardized version of the story I’ve been wanting to write for sixteen years.

The real story began on the back of a Barnes and Noble receipt when I was working the front registers, mindless of being on camera, bored out of my mind, and telling myself more fiction than fact about a situationship I was brooding over. The word situationship wasn’t even a part of modern-day vernacular yet. The internet had not banded together to tell us all we were giving more and accepting less. The real fantasy was that I was in deep with a rapper who collected women like heroin needles: a fix-fantastic, then forgotten.

Two events began this story in my mind.

The second time I visited this rapper, paying money I did not have, to get a room at a fancy Minneapolis hotel across from First Ave, my period started the next day. My twenties were performative. I wanted to be the cool girl, the girl men found effortless and attractive. I didn’t want to be limited by how painfully prudish, shy, and insecure I was, so I put on an act. Imagine my horror at having to declare to this man that I was bleeding. My body was to be used by men. Showing the care and nurture my reproductive system required was akin to admitting I was journaling a version of this narrative that was a love story, not a sex one. I had to call the concierge and ask for a tampon. The said tampon was delivered, with a 4$ surcharge, on a literal silver platter. When it arrived, the rapper answered the door. As I apologized profusely for daring to have my vagina be on the receiving end of my reproductive organs, he said, simply: “I used to be a butcher; a little blood does not bother me.”

The characters of Mira and the Butcher were born.

The thing about dating a rapper is that words are his livelihood. So much more than a little twenty-something girl working in the Barnes and Noble cafe and dreaming about being a writer. He would send text messages that read like love letters: “I am in Washington D.C., and I swear I smell you. I am convinced the reason this city is so full of grime and decay is that it only knew your beauty for such a short time.”

Real panty droppers.

In one casual conversation, he said, looking me in the eye, “Even with dirty faces, we still lick our wounds.”

This is a line.

This is MY line.

I built an entire world around this line, much as I built an entire relationship around the fact that this man messaged me on MySpace, fucked me in hotel rooms I paid for, and then disappeared into the throes of addiction and younger, blonder, women who could hang.

I’ve circled this plot like the drain of my youth and fuckability. It was the first time I spent months building a world on the backs of receipts and in notebooks. I saw a character before I knew her backstory. I knew the character of the Butcher because I was inventing him in real life and in fiction simultaneously. In many ways, this story helped me understand why I was putting myself in risky situations. It let me know that a man could breathe a line into my soul, and I would accept whatever came with it. I would create fiction good enough to make it worth it, both muse and the musing. You do not need to know the full plot of this story to know the ending: the Butcher is the Archangel Michael. Mira is saved.

I never knew how to do this for myself. I look to men to define me. I do not know how to finish my own sentence.