Excellent

 

In between barely keeping up on my art assignments, I have been revising several short stories for my creative writing app. I find the creative writing pieces infinitely more exciting, but a stubbornness in me refuses to let go of my fine arts major completely (I am contemplating a nearly impossible, summer school filled double major, when I really should be spending this summer in treatment) and the fear that I won't be accepted in the program (inadequate, a failure, like everything else) has kept me from sharing this information to anyone, really.

I wouldn't dare tell my father, who didn't want me applying to an arts program of any kind in the first place. I told my mother, who was cautiously optimistic. She was more concerned with my flighty temperament that goes along with my bursts of ideas, the crashes and the "this is pointless, why did I even think I could" that are sure to follow any new initiative I undertake. But something in my thought one piece in particular was good enough to be revised, and I was unattached enough to have already braced myself for rejection and a poor response. But, aside from syntactical errors, the response has been... overwhelmingly positive. People like it. It is dark, they tell me, but they found the prose haunting and beautiful. I have never been so proud of anyone liking anything before, and it was with that courage that I sent a third draft to my mother.

My mother, busy recovering from a funeral service and surgery, had not had the time to read it. I'll get to it later, I promise, she said. I didn't really expect her to read it at all, really, I just felt proud that I could send her my own work.

So imagine my surprise when I opened a new text message on my phone after a morning of puking bile:

"Hi! I just read a short story you wrote. It was excellent!!! Hope you are having a good day. I just got on the train. XO"

Never before... have I heard my father having finished a book he enjoyed in his entire life. Has he ever responded positively to any of my creative endeavors, or told me I was excellent at anything. My entire life I have been failing at pleasing my father, and somehow this short story got to him and made him text me out of the blue to tell me (with three exclamation points) that I did something excellent.

I was so unbeliving that I called him back, and managed to get him before he went through the tunnel.

"How did you get it?" I asked him. My mother had forwarded it to him. More importantly, did he really think it was excellent?

A pause. "I imagined it perfectly. It could have been the opening of a film. You are an extraordinarily talented writer, _____. I mean it."

He meant it. I was excellent. I feel like Nina Sayers and The Fighter and Sailormoon at once, I have finally done something right, I am finally good enough. Finally, finally, finally..