Jennifer Hendricks

A Life, Quickly Examined I’ve lost my writing pieces over and over again. I’ve lost poetry, essays, articles, countless beginnings to countless short stories (I’m not much of a fiction writer), journals, you name it. I’ve lost them to villainy, destruction, a computer fire, and my own PMS madness. I’ve hit every one of the adjectives that can describe my feelings upon realizing, once again, that my cover has been blown and I must up and write fresh words. I am usually horrified at first. And uncomprehending. My writings are lost? What does that mean? Then I wake up from my stupefaction enough to emote. It began with my journals, written in covert conditions so that my mother would never know I was keeping them. If she didn’t know that, she’d never look for them. Or so my thinking went as a 12-yr. old. I acquired my first boyfriend. I imagined possible, even though improbable, scenarios by writing them out. When was he going to take my hand in public? Was he ever going to kiss me? What kind of disaster would that entail? I was driven to examine every angle, coming up with a different answer each time. I couldn’t let anyone know I was doing this, and I certainly couldn’t gab with my girlfriends like I could confide to my diary. I was balancing a precarious cool in eighth grade, being part of a quartet of popular girls far more confident than myself. I was replaceable. That said, I had to retain and display a poised demeanor. Everything else went into those private books. After high school those journals were tossed in the trash. I didn’t even need to set fire to them—they were witness to an immature girl who I gratefully grew out of. Goodbye diaries. Hello journals! The word “journal” was so much more sophisticated anyway. These books would be filled with mad dashings of wild nights and weekend parties, of true love and forever friends. I wrote in them as if they were something I would read again and again as I became old and gray, my life quiet and uneventful. I’d imagine that future photograph in my mind as I finished another glorious page. I was right in a sense. Those journals were wild all right. They also had a lot of pain, despair, and longing in them. I had the same boyfriend for all of high school, a boy I loved desperately. My parents hated him; I was banned from seeing him seemingly all of the time. He killed himself on my graduation day. Those journals turned into a painful reminder, but I don’t think “painful” is exactly the right word here. They were filled with so much anguish that I thought I’d never be able to open them again. So those, too, got thrown away. I began writing more seriously after high school. No more notes written between classes to friends. No more love-maddened poetry. And absolutely no more diaries. Sometimes, afterward, I’d think about Socrates’ quote, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Then I’d turn to a response I had also read, “Someone who engages in self-critical examination eventually becomes entangled with it.” I was tired of the ties that bind, tired of the process journaling. And so, having always enjoyed my literature classes best, I turned to the fiction as my psychic outlet. I wrote and wrote and found it difficult. I’d begin a short story with the very loftiest of intentions only to find that I didn’t have much of an imagination. My pen would wander heavily then stop altogether. Out of exasperation on night, I took took up my goal of writing again. I spun it around, looking for cracks that I might use as leverage to crack it open. I sat down once again and just gave up, but I wouldn’t let go of the pen. Poetry has always been a peach for me to write. I was never one of those writers who just had to write, that just had to get it all down and RIGHT NOW! Rather, I could decide to write one, sit down to my typewriter, and write a poem. A good poem—one that was clever and succinct. I filled entire ZIP discs (remember those?) with my poetry. I won awards. One of my closest friends in college wrote fiction and we entered a contest together: my poetry up against her fiction. We both tied for first place and it was glorious. We took our pooled $200 and bought shoes! Several years later I was having some troubles: moving from place to place, living out of my car, and so on. I handed those discs and a bunch of notebooks to my beloved fiction writer for safekeeping. When things in my life had resumed the shape of normality a couple of years later, I went back for them. I stood on her porch. She didn’t let me in the door but made me stand on the porch while she went inside, presumably to gather my things. A short while later she came out with nothing in her hands. “Where is my stuff?” I asked? “Gone,” she said. “Gone?” “I must have lost it.” Just a year ago when we resumed our much-altered friendship (she asked me if I’d help her with a job; she was going to be my new boss), she recalled just how badly I yelled at her. I had forgotten. She said she would never. I have moved a lot since then. So much. My biggest move was across the country. Since moving to South Carolina, I’ve moved from three houses. Things get thrown in boxes and tend to stay there, especially paper. Long after my realization that I wasn’t going to be a fiction writer and soon after my hand-off safekeeping tryout, I began to write more naturally. What came naturally was essays. I had so much to say; I still have. I am asked for writing samples from potential employers even though the jobs I’m looking for are editorial. Essays are what they get. There are periods when I’m pushed to write one, and then there are periods of my life when I am inspired. I’ve decided that what spills from my mind deserves a better chance at life than what I’ve given it.