Write about what you know.
She walked, heels slapping against linoleum floor, passing pale paper to fifth graders who shoved and giggled and strained their necks towards the rounded clock above the chalkboard. But first, brainstorm. Some ancient method meant to unearth all the things we “knew” from all the years we had to start “knowing” them. Then, pick one.
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I reviewed my list when I was done. My sister’s bat mitzvah, the day my dog got hit by a car, trips, holidays, summer camps and crowded concerts and intertwining clichés that filled the page down to the last, slightly torn hole punch. And although my friends had circled their choices with colored sharpies, some already picking up their pencils to write with a smooth and subtle consistency, I sat there wondering.
So, this is what I knew: a lifetime compilation of memories that my peers undoubtedly shared with only slight differentiations in experience. I’m not saying my fifth grade self reached some sort of divine revelation before lunch, but it left me rattled. Yes, I sat up and circled the most “unique” bullet point, but I did so with a quiet sense that I had disappointed a part of myself I didn’t quite understand. My teacher marked the finished product with a smiley face and a gold star.
Even now, expanded by the knowledge eight more years has given me; I’m still unsatisfied with the accepted understanding that writers should “write what we know.” How is it that my final, lingering thoughts before I drift to sleep never contain comforting hues of assuredness, but flicker and sting with the reddened presence of uncertainty? I don’t ask to perpetually find myself in the unknown, a place where nothing is constant and everything is fragile, but it seems as if my mind has a separate agenda.
To me, “knowing” something comes with unavoidable complexity. What’s known and unknown swirl into each other like balls of colored clay, stretching and compressing until someone attempts to reach inside and pull them apart. I know who I love, but not always who I’ll stay loving. I know anger and dislike, but never hate. I know a sort of sadness that makes the kitchen lights become a little less bright to me, but time softens the edges of that sadness, until hurt becomes a stranger I didn’t seem to know in the first place.
Maybe the only thing I know with complete certainty is that being present inside the realm of the unknown comes with its own sense of comfort. Even the memories jotted down in a fifth grader’s scrabbled handwriting wouldn't fall neatly into a category labeled “knowing.” Maybe, just maybe, people are meant to live every second of life under the umbrella of uncertainty, drift to sleep in the hands of ambiguity, wonder and want with an unquenchable thirst for unattainable mysteries. Maybe that’s how we’re all living anyway, and we just don’t “know” it yet.
On a completely contradictory and incredibly convoluting side note,
I don’t get much sleep.
