The receipt dated a year ago today shows that you arrived at 5am. I cannot imagine being up at 5am ever again, even to catch an 8am flight from New York to Portland like I did that day. The problem I always run into is that I am a grumpy traveler. Or, to be more exact, I’m a nervous traveler with a short temper, an imp that becomes a Monique I don’t recognize until I’m safe in a hotel room and have checked that I did, in fact, include my medication, my clothes, my phone charger, my wallet.
I was worried you’d be faced with this ugly travel imp at 5am. I’m sure on any given day, if you’d had a passenger schedule a 5am ride, you’d assume your chances of driving around a travel imp would be high anyway. On top of that, I was plain worried. I hadn’t traveled to the west coast since 2015 when I spent the better part of three days inside the Los Angeles Convention Center. I’d never been to Portland before, and this trip would last a week.
I wanted to spend the 50-minute ride to the airport in silence, but you knew better. A window was rolled down halfway to keep me from sleeping, and the wind that roared into the cab meant we had to raise our voices to hear each other. Every question you asked took me further from what I was scared about—”what do you do” instead of “where are you going”; “what books does your company publish,” not “are you ready to be taught under your hero and critique nine strangers in workshop while also balancing personal and professional goals like reading your work to an audience of peers and meeting with agents?”
I was headed to the Tin House Summer Workshop, a writers conference that I had dreamed of attending for years. I had never applied before, but I told myself I would have to start at some point. That year, I applied to every place I thought was too good for me. I didn’t know what I was ready for and I wanted to know exactly how much further I had to go to get where I wanted to be. I never expected to already be right where I dreamed of being.
“I think you do very inspirational things,” you said. “That is amazing.”
Maybe you say that to all your passengers. You were enthusiastic the whole ride, and it was nice to not have to think about the immediate future, as if my life was normally “inspirational” and “amazing.” It was nice to not be worried. There was nothing, after all, to worry about.
When I think about the Tin House Summer Workshop now, I don’t start with the opening remarks, or when I set foot in Reed College, or when I boarded my plane and found myself in the seat between the agent whom I had scheduled a meeting with and a fellow attendee who would be in my workshop and was reading a pile of stories, mine included. All of these moments had their own fears attached to them. They all floated away as quickly as they materialized.
The workshop director’s insistence that “we all belong here” felt practiced but genuine, and I found a handful of old friends for company in the lecture hall. Reed College had been difficult to navigate after the Lyft driver dropped us off in a strange part of the campus, but a faculty member (another hero of mine) appeared out of nowhere to guide me and my new friend and workshop peer to where we were supposed to go. The agent was a lovely seat companion who introduced herself as soon as I pointed out to my other seatmate that she was in my workshop group (and to please not read my story in front of me). My peer gushed about her Tin House experience the year before, and the two of them continued to build confidence in how wonderful my week would be during the flight and on the Lyft ride to campus. They were right.
I start the story with you because the cab ride was the first in a week-long line of moments like this. I was scared about everything falling apart. Instead, everything fell into place better than I imagined. I sang poorly on karaoke night and people danced anyway! My trivia group won! Yet another hero stopped me in the dining hall to say he enjoyed my reading! My workshop group built a bonfire and took turns reading a scary story! I could write tens of thousands of words detailing each experience I had and how I changed, but this letter only has room for a thousand of them.
It’s been a year since, a period of time that I find impossibly long and uncannily short. I’ve become close friends with so many people I never thought I’d have the privilege of meeting, friends I can still connect with even if I’ve been stuck in my studio for four months.
The lessons I took that week are more plentiful than this simple observation of first being scared and then being comforted. Being worried isn’t fun. Having fear doesn’t promise an optimistic outcome. I think what I want in conjuring these memories is the hopeful recognition that this happened before and that maybe it won’t be the only time that it does.
My worries are at an all-time high. I look forward to when I can next take a ride to some fantastic world where those worries disappear. I want to do inspirational things. I want to be amazing. I want to understand how you and everyone else I met that week knew that I was these things already, and I want to know if and when this will all happen again.
Take care,
Monique