I’ve recently started trying more creative writing and it’s been so much more healing than the way I used to approach my creative writing. You see, when I was young, I was going to be an author. Of like, books. Real books. With whole-ass, big long stories. Not someone who wrote and posted random ramblings no one else read on the internet.

Life sort of got in the way of that and I had what I suppose you could call a bit of midlife crisis (I maintain it’s still a bit early for that, but details, schetails) and decided I was going to kick my own ass and really write something great for NaNoWriMo. I wrote a lot of something! It was maybe… okay? I haven’t been able to look at it again because what I succeeded in doing was mostly just the kicking my own ass part. I was trying to take some outside classes as well as work full time and write a 50,000 word novel(la) in 30 days. I barely even ironically blame hustle culture.

That was exhausting and I cried pretty much every day in November. Some days multiple times. I had finally succeeded in doing what I’d been teetering on the edge of for about six years, I burnt myself out. I stopped writing my novel(la), which by that point, I fully hated, and haven’t yet opened that document up again. I was practically inconsolable. I was never going to be a “real” writer and I needed to just learn to live with that.

But then I saw an ad for an online writing group and I decided I’d give it a try. And I was so grateful I did. We weren’t all working on big long projects, it was a new prompt every session! And there wasn’t any pressure to critique or one-up anyone, just encouragement to let your imagination take you anywhere.

It was a much needed breath of fresh air for me. The phrase, “if you write, you’re a writer” finally felt true to me. And I was reminded of the intrinsic value of doing things simply for the joy of doing them. Even more magical, I got the chance to do something that brought me joy, share it with others, and hear other people’s writing as well. It was something I hadn’t experienced in a long, long time.

There’s something deeply intimate about sharing writing, especially creative writing that’s a response to the same prompt others get. Not only are you able to see stories others saw in the same prompt, but you allow others a tiny, brief window into how you saw the prompt as well. It’s vulnerable. But it’s also a bit of a rush.

I suppose I’ve become a bit addicted to that rush. Because here I am sharing one of those stories again. I hope you enjoy it.

The Saxophonist

Everything hurt. Still. He’d always hated those pain scale charts in the ER. He had stopped rating the pain long ago. What good would it do him to rate something as constant and unchanging as the tides?

Instead, the pain had become a sort of wallpaper on the structure of his life. A constant background of alternating dull and sharp ouches that were oddly comforting in a way, because at least they meant he was alive. 

The background wallpaper was so constant and “normal” to him that he often forgot about it. Not because it didn’t still hurt, but because if he let himself, his entire world would be reduced to it. So when he went to the doctor, he often genuinely forgot to mention it.

“Why aren’t you telling him about all the joint pain?” Katie had nearly shouted, half accusatory when she’d started going to his appointments with him. And then, to the doctor, she’d said in a huff, “He’s always been this way, always like he has this macho need to prove his toughness.”

But that wasn’t it. How could he explain to someone who he’d never wish this pain on that his pain had become so commonplace as to be nearly nonexistent? How could he explain that he genuinely often just forgot?

And the pain had been nothing to the hurt when she’d accused him of faking. “You can play music just fine,” she’d scolded. “Funny that.” But he wasn’t just fine. Every finger placement was his own personal bittersweet symphony of pain and pleasure. How on earth could he explain that when he powered through one thing, it meant being destroyed for everything else that day?

He couldn’t, and maybe then, she hadn’t been in a place to accept that.

But here, now, backstage after his last concert, it seems maybe she can.

“Hey dad,” she says. He has to sit down. And not just because this pain is new, this feeling of his heart breaking anew for all the years they’ve spent apart, only for it to stitch itself back together with steel thread because at last, he’s seeing her again.

“Hey sweetheart,” he says, forcing a smile, even though his face is tired and hurts too. “Can’t suppose I could ask you to hand me that bottle of water and one of my pills from the dressing table over there, could I?”

The look on her face is nearly as wobbly as his voice, but she nods and grabs the water and medicine and placing them in his hands. She doesn’t even need to be asked to open the cursed child safe bottle and he thinks that maybe this means she finally understands. His fingers and wrists can’t handle much of anything else today.

“You were great today,” she says, her voice oddly scratchy.

“I sing an alright swan song for an old invalid, don’t I?”

“You’re not -” he knows she wants to say he’s not an invalid, but neither of them are here to lie to each other. Instead she says, “You’ve always been a ‘must-see’ concert. But no one’s forgetting that one.”