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written by ellen grace
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illustration by anastasia kozachinskaya
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I take words and write them down, more often than I should. I wish I could write down and remember everything. Certain words put together compel me to write them down and keep them forever. There are notes in my phone with phrases that begin unfinished ideas, which in the moment I believed would lead to later creation.
On my way to school, the subway car was empty except for me and two other women. I smelled the coffee they were drinking and wished I had some of my own. I heard one of them say to the other, “Go and read and see friends and meet people and you have your baby.” Seemed like an easy decision to me. I imagined her in a large home in the countryside surrounded by friends as she grew more and more visibly . She sat and read, and her family made her meals from scratch, and they all dined together and discussed the world, this new baby who will be entering it, and how they can improve it.
I thought of a situation so different from my current reality, of what it would be like to be this woman right now. Although this stranger is likely not the woman of my imagination, one who is living the life of pregnant luxury, I got enough of a glimpse to envision a story.
I am drawn to these excerpts, these tiny flickers of the lives of others. They are fun to live in for a moment, to imagine what life would look like if I was the one speaking the overheard words.
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I heard a man on the bus repeating over and over to himself the phrase “old strawberry road.” I wrote it down with the thought to look it up later, and then I forgot about it for months. I found the note later on and had to try to remember where it came from. His words had become my words to decipher and contextualize. There is an Old Strawberry Road in California; maybe he has been there, or wishes to go. There is a song called Strawberry Road by Sam Phillips about fading dreams and running to love. Maybe he had heard it before. Maybe it was nonsense. Maybe those words existed for him as a way to interpret his current reality. For me, they became a memory, constantly rewritten every time I reread that note. I wonder where he is now, and I still wonder what those words meant to him.
As a writer, I am always concerned about where my creativity comes from. I want my work to be so deeply my own that when words appear in my head I worry that they belong to someone else. I worry that if I write from those appeared words, someone will come out and say those words were not born in me but were only planted there. They will claim them as flower because they planted them as seed.
I also wonder what pieces of my life I have the right to tell. An overheard conversation becomes an intersection, caught between the linear story of my life and the story of theirs. They have become part of my life experience. Does that give me the authority to take in what I heard and bring it elsewhere?
I listened to a woman talk about curing cancer with magnetic bracelets. I heard her friend answer that everything causes cancer nowadays, so “what’s the point?” I thought about my mom’s cancer, and I felt anger rising within me. What if she believed in the power of a special bracelet, as opposed to the treatments that saved her life? Are there people out there dying because they believe what this lady believes? Who else is she preaching to? I thought about whatever company told her that magnetic forces would save her life and took her money. Later on, I realized that the idea of curing disease with a bracelet probably brought her hope, or some mangled version of it. A magic cure-all object sounds nice, really.
These fragments always lend themselves to judgment.
I wonder why someone would talk like that, why someone would live that way, what happened to them for their life to reach that point. I compare using the smallest context, as if one conversation can present the whole of a person. The stories of strangers are not my stories to tell. I cannot rightfully know anything about them from hearing them talk for such a small amount of time. The story I can tell is of my reception and absorption of these words, and of how these strangers shift and affect my thinking.
I heard boys on the subway saying the girl that their friend brought to a party was not hot enough. I wondered what they thought of me, and of my body. From them and their words, I wrote about how I will never be one of those girls, the kind that guys on the subway call “hot.” It is something I wish I were born into but not something I should try to control. What I take from these words does not really reveal those who said them. They mattered to me in that moment because of who I am, and who I was then. They tell of the reasons I wrote them down, and the reasons I thought I should keep them for later. They are not a way for me to understand a stranger; they are a way for me to understand myself.
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