every time i write, i wish. every work is a wish for something: to be seen, to be heard, for the world to be different.
from a tweet to a post-it note to a novel manuscript… it’s all about what could be.
ONCE UPON A TIME…
there was a kid. they read to escape from the world, and they read because they loved it. that kid began to write. they loved it so much they ordered their whole life around it—for better or for worse. there were many people who did not like the way they read and wrote, and they also did not like the way that many other people read and wrote. but whatever happened, whatever anyone said to them, cruel or kind, they couldn’t help it: they kept writing. they kept reading. until the day they died.
BACK WHEN I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A KID…
i was rewarded so much for reading! as if i needed the push. i read nonstop, all the time, as many books as i could. i loved fantasy and science fiction and fairy tales and spec fic more than the entire world. i would have sold my soul to be a hero in a fantasy book, and i wouldn’t have missed anything about planet earth. well—maybe i would now. but as a child, i escaped from home fights and terrifying school days into the soft, quiet pages of books.
AS A SOMETIME-TEEN…
people wanted a lot more from me. high school through college, did i read at all? sometimes, sometimes. a few very good books and occasionally whatever my classes assigned. it is strange, and stupid, but it’s like i forgot how to. not that i forgot how to read but the purpose of it, the joy of it, the value of it. i think there was too much i needed to do all the time, and my ability to meet–to exceed–expectations dwindled every year.
in 2020, when everything shut down, i came out of that years-long coma. nobody could ask anything of me anymore because, of course, nothing was happening. like many others, i realized how little joy there was in my day-to-day. it made me sad, terribly sad, because my days were filled with writing, reading, proximity to either. but none of it was me, was mine.
i cannot say much more because there is so much, so much, packed into the few years from march 2020 to today. i learned to read again; i learned to read for class; i learned to read for myself; i learned to write again; i learned to play video games again and watch movies and participate in reading/writing/culture. god, my god, the change over three years. i need the words of others to talk about it because i don’t understand it myself. i am nothing at all like i was in march of 2020; my reading and writing are nothing at all like they were in the march of 2020; i am exactly the same as i was in march of 2020; somehow, i am that person even more.
BUT DID I WRITE BEFORE THAT? WHEN DID I BEGIN TO WRITE?
i wrote a novel in 2017 (my senior year of high school) during National Novel Writing Month for an independent study in my creative writing elective class, the one i wasn’t supposed to be taking. but i did, i could, because my history teacher was kind and my creative writing teacher was kind, and they saw the way i orbited words long, long before i did. though i felt it—i mean, i started trying to write a novel in fifth grade! with my best friend and a green panda notebook won from girl scout cookie sales. we ripped off twitches and percy jackson & the olympians. we never finished. we never stopped trying.
i wrote a long horror story with a friend in second grade where everyone disappeared one day and we could never find them again. we asked the third grade teacher in charge of the school newspaper to publish it. she laughed and said maybe next time—and maybe if it was shorter. i can’t remember how it ended. did we write an ending? how did we know how to write? how did i know how to write?
a teacher in third grade is angry at a boy who read a book faster than she believes possible for him. she doesn’t believe he read it all; she doesn’t want to let him take the AR test. in front of the whole class and with a prim anger in her mouth, she asks me how long it took me to read it. it’s a harry potter book. i don’t remember if i’ve read it or not. nothing takes me longer than a few days. i am confused in my head, but my face says at least a day and a half. does he get punished? why did she use me against him? we are not the same person. how did she know i’d read it? did everyone assume i’d read everything in the library? when did they stop thinking that? when did i stop thinking that was possible? did he really read the book? does he remember this moment even now, a decade plus later, with pain? what am i in his literacy narrative?
in first grade, they introduce a student council. the school is still good, prior to the 2010 red wave. never great, our district, but it has its moments, its legacies, its sweet spots. the state is full of talent and intellect beyond your wildest dreams, but it’s like a river with a waterfall at the end that leads to nowhere. it flows off the face of the earth and you fall for a long time and there is never an impact where you are on solid ground again, even broken and drowned from the water, you keep falling and falling and falling until you dissipate and disappear, if you don’t make it out of the river before you go over. but there’s no one around to help and if you’re not from a well-off family, you had no money to purchase equipment before you set out on the river journey and the river is wide, wide, wide. a beautiful thing, though. god, is it beautiful.
i am elected to the student council as my homeroom’s class rep. i didn’t ask to be nominated; i didn’t realize people voted for me until the teacher said so, and i had a big moment of sentience as a little kid with little control. i thought: oh? you guys—you trust me? oh! oh! i will—i can do this. i am responsible. thank you. we toured the state capitol; it was so beautiful. one of the teachers saw something sad in me, and from then on she said hello and gave me a hug and asked me how i was every time she saw me. in second grade, she would always bring an extra goodie bag for me, like the ones she made for her class. she was so kind. my second grade teacher brags, even to this day, that she was the one to give me my first “f.” “i gave her her first ‘f’! she was so shocked!’” she means well. she only says it because she thinks i’m smart enough to do anything, so it surely doesn’t matter that i got the bad grade. she taught me an important lesson, she thinks.
i was always in a different reading group, the most accelerated. i was in the quest program, the gifted kid program. i left my class to go down the hall to someone else’s to read because they were further along, and i needed the challenge; i tested out of my own classroom. i left for the whole day every wednesday for two years to learn about special things, to learn art and history, and it was fun. it was fun. it was good. it fostered my love of history; it gave me room for expression. but i was the only one out of my classroom to go. the only one who missed the wednesday activities. today, it’s a meme: the burnt out gifted kid. someone claims that the gifted program was just another type of special ed; another way to separate the “weird” kids from the “normal” kids so we wouldn’t be disruptive. only, you were called “gifted” if you could still be productive and useful to society, and “special” if they had already given up on you. either way, it wasn’t about you; it wasn’t about your happiness, success, your growth. it was about getting you out of the way.
i think i knew how to read much earlier than i did. but for some reason, i was convinced i wouldn’t be able to read—i couldn’t read until first grade, so i didn’t. i loved to read, i could read already. but i didn’t. where did i get that idea? where did i learn that false limitation? i can’t remember despite all the time i’ve written about, despite all my wishes for just a hint of what happened. i remember sitting in my dad’s lap sobbing as i read a book out loud to him, as we read the book together for class homework, our mandated twenty-minute reading time. i’ll get in trouble, i sobbed, i’m not supposed to read like this yet. i don’t want to be bad. i don’t want to be bad.
I HAVE NOT BEEN A CHILD FOR A LONG TIME, NOW.
i have words now: words that i’ve been told that i’ve fashioned for myself, that i’ve found by accident and dumb luck. among them: hyperlexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, neurodivergent, disabled… numbers slip out of my mind like spiders down spidersilk and swap places like a whack-a-mole, complete with me hurting myself the harder i try to hit them, pin them in place. i make words like mosquitoes mate, and they spill out of everything i do. always too many words, always not enough words. they are pretty, sometimes; they are profound, sometimes; they are hateful, sometimes. it depends on the point of view, i suppose.
as a kid, as an alabama teen, i swam in the shallow part of the river; there were few others there awake enough to write like i tried, and so i got by easy. but now we’re in the deep end, the riverbed a gash miles below the surface. it’s crowded, and i have never done well with crowds. i keep to myself and keep making words, but no one picks them up until i stop leaving them out. i am too busy to send them out. i am too busy to publish them, too busy trying to get them right to not get it wrong. i am trying to be better; i am trying to not be worse; i am trying to keep up; i am trying to keep my head above water. i am trying very, very, very hard.
i do not know how to ask for help. no one wants to offer it either. what if lose my footing and really fall for real this time and drag them down, drown them with me? i am told again and again: why don’t you know this already? you can’t be like this in the real world. maybe this isn’t the right career for you. tell us what is wrong with you, as soon as you know, and ignore the danger that disclosure brings. spill your private health struggles to strangers or we will not believe you when you say you tried to be better. rage against us–so when we are kind, it will feel worse than you can imagine. you will never know if your emotions were justified. you will blame yourself. you will be a monster.
as the litany in my head goes, an echolalia of other voices: i wish you just knew how to do this, like the others. i wish you wouldn’t be so anxious. i wish you would talk more. i wish you would talk less. i wish you follow the assignment guidelines better. i wish you would turn things in on time. i wish you would write less. i wish you would write more. i wish you would read my mind and stop asking me questions and stop getting things wrong. i wish you would stop asking what you’re doing wrong and figure it out for yourself. i wish you would be less cringey; i wish you would be less pretentious; i wish you would be more serious; i wish you would be less angry; i wish you would be more angry; i wish you would stop being so goddamn emotional; i wish you would stop crying. i wish you would be someone else. i wish you would stop making my life hard. i wish you would give up. i wish you would disappear.
it is a work of remarkable promise. it is like going out on the football field blindfolded with your hands tied behind your back, and scoring the winning touchdown. i really, truly believe you can do anything you set your mind to. will you read that essay i saw you perform before to introduce an author at pure products this thursday? absolutely fantastic paper, tori—a pleasure to read, well-reasoned, and well-researched. you might look into publishing it!
I WISH…
it will be so hard, this life i want, fashioned out of letters and words and the things we build with them. but every time i am asked about it, and about what writing means to me, to recount my literacy narrative or to journal about my writing journey, i come to the same conclusions. i write in the same ways. i recount what everyone has told me, good and bad, because i cradle their words to my heart as proof that i am doing something. i think of how much pain i’ve felt thanks to reading and writing, and i think of how much love i’ve felt thanks to reading and writing. i look at myself, into myself, and i know that there is no other life for me. i am deeply sensitive and often emotional, arcane, unncessarily-poetic—and yet; and despite that; and because of that: my core is solid steel. i will write. i will always write. because i always want the same thing, year after year; and i write the same thing again and again; and i make the same wish over and over:
I WISH TO KEEP WISHING.
POST-SCRIPT (FOR THE FUTURE).
Victoria Oh is a second-year MAWP student, concentrating on speculative writing and the teaching of writing. They have had work published in Polyphony Lit, Marr’s Field Journal, and Deep South Magazine. They are also a volunteer reader for Uncharted Magazine and work at DePaul’s own John T. Richardson Library.
Endnotes
[i] This quote is from Chris Abani’s Dog Woman. The screenshot was taken by the author of this piece, Victoria Oh.
[ii] Frank Bidart, “Guilty of Dust.”
[iii] Sources for these quotes, from top to bottom: (1) Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, (2) Marguerite Duras, The Love, (3) Brian Murphy, Not Another D&D Podcast, (4) Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine.
[iv] Published in the anthologies You Will Be Able To Say A Thousand Words and They’re Singing A Song In Their Rocket by 826DC.
[v] Drawn by Tumblr user @kalo-pop.
[vi] Could not find the original source of this image.
[vii] Joe Wenderoth, If I Don’t Breathe How Do I Sleep.
[viii] Drawn by Tumblr user @paperbagedhead.
[ix] Could not find the original source of this image.
[x] Could not find the original source of this image.
[xi] Anne Carson, Red Doc.
[xii] Suzanne Rivecca, “Ugly, Bitter, and True.”
[xiii] Trista Mateer.
[xiv] Euripides, Herakles (translated by Anne Carson).
[xv] Victoria Oh, “ask me to play, ask me to stay.”
[xvi] Victoria Oh, “ask me to play, ask me to stay.”
[xvii] Brennan Lee Mulligan, Dimension 20.
[xxiii] Amy Hempel, Sing To It.
[xix] First quote: Bertolt Brecht, “Motto.”
[xx] Pokemon: Indigo League.
[xxi] Frank Bidart, “Guilty of Dust.”