Leaving Xs

They say that once you learn to meditate, everything you do becomes an act of meditation. The same is true for writing, I think. I wake up writing. Scoop the litter, start the laundry, brew a cup, check to see if my broken heart is scabbing over. Breathe a grateful breath for having gone eighteen days without cigarettes. Check Italian Tinder. Wake my computer and work up a website to make wealthy California realtors even wealthier. Check Substack. Read dazzling bits of math and science, laugh at a grocery store anecdote. Decide not to think about cigarettes. Decide not to imagine my ex’s new girl and how skinny she must be. Hang laundry on the outside lines, run four miles along the Sàvena River, shower, read a few chapters of DeLillo, wondering at the splendid turns of phrase and detesting the absolute boredom of rich people. Yell at my teenagers for the dirty kitchen. Schedule revenge sex on Tinder. Throw away the Chesterfield Blues I shouldn’t have bought on my run. Lie to my teenagers when they ask if I bought cigarettes on my run. Explain to my teenagers why gorgeous people are rarely good in bed. Export realtor designs. Call my ex’s father, whom I love with my whole broken heart, to see if he’s eating and if the scans of his new lung nodules are back. Haul my pack, heavy with hard-cover books, to a café and take my usual table by the door. Unfold my iPad. Close it again. Read Chabon, wondering at the splendid turns of phrase and the optimism—love even—undergirding a three-page description of a dirty kitchen. Stir blonde sugar into a decaffeinated Americano. Explain to nearby Italians how Trump is more Mussolini than Berlusconi. Bum a cigarette. On my phone, watch a video of dildos thumping the windows of an ICE truck. On the café television, watch American bombs detonate. Apologize to Italians for my gluttonous goblin of a country. Open my iPad. Stare at nothing. Ponder the gluttonous goblins who run cults and corporations and countries. Write ten words, check Italian Tinder, send a flirtatious message with questionable grammar. Write a thousand words, a new story starting to coagulate, about the folks who struggle. The stubborn ones. The brave ones. The ones who can’t back down, can’t shut up, can’t breathe. Leave Xs in place of names I’ll invent later, just crunching the sentences, getting down loosely and sinuously the story that has been gaining mass all day and all this year and since the breakup and since the birth of my children and the death and resurrection of my faith, and since the time I stumbled across a mug shot of my brother online, all the way back to the day my father spanked my mother with an army boot, a story that was always in the works and is now finally arriving with its mundane grit and inevitable surprises, reminding me, as my stories usually do, that cults and fiefdoms and empires don’t endure. That in the end, they always eat themselves.

Daniela Meyer is a graphic designer and cofounder of a tech company who lives in Bologna, Italy. Her work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been published by The Republic of Letters, The Pett Review, Indignor House, and Bad Clown Books. Both her short stories and novels explore working class characters, unexpected connection, and power struggle. She holds a bachelor’s in fine arts, is a lifelong songwriter, and once illustrated a picture book about a young girl’s cheese addiction, which was in no way autobiographical. More at dmclemens.substack.com. 

This essay is a Short Reads original.