nOVEL PREVIEW | A ROADTRIP FOR THE AGES | SOMETHING I MAY WORK ON FROM TIME TO TIME
The Unbearable Loneliness of Being Alive
By Emma Sparrow / Mighty.Beautiful Art Studio
Introducing Sadie
I don’t know what I’m writing here but I’m writing. Because this is the end and this is the beginning. This is the end of my old life and the beginning of my next life. Not my next next life, the one after this life, but my next life within this life of mine, of this girl (do I really have to call myself a woman?) born 38 years ago to my parents, God love them, genes and all.
How many times do we tell ourselves that? That this is the beginning and the end and the beginning and the end and all things are temporary even when we wished, thought, that some things were permanent. We’re taught these myths about unconditional love, and I believe in unconditional love, but not even unconditional love lasts forever.
Nothing lasts forever.
You don’t know me, or maybe you do, or maybe you think you do from that book I wrote that like 400 people read. I don’t think you do because in some ways I barely know myself, even though I think I know myself. I think too much about being too much. I feel so much my body I can’t handle it. I can get lost in a moment’s notice and it can go one way or the other way or every way all at once. I don’t really want to talk about it, really. I mean, not this soon. I definitely don’t know you. We’re just getting started.
Tomorrow morning we’re leaving. It’s funny how everything is always happening tomorrow, isn’t it? But it’s true. Tomorrow morning we’re leaving and we don’t know when we’ll be back again and I don’t know what’s going to happen and I don’t know where I’m going but I know where I am heading. To Alaska. Or wherever. You, me, my tiny camper and my dog are blowing this god-forsaken-popsicle-stand we call home and taking our hearts elsewhere. No more leaving that behind, piece by piece, bit by bit, every clawed off piece of tissue I’ve ever gone through. Every single cell of it that I’ve managed to stitch back together and somehow save from various piles of rubble is important to me right now. It’s all coming with me.
My stuff? Yeah I’m leaving all that behind, everything that I haven’t sold off and given away and pawned and stored. I’ve got my laptop,7 pairs of clothes, a tent, a sleeping bag, my camera equipment, a monitor and a bunch of art supplies. I will admit, I’m not exactly packing lightly for this trip, but it’s going to be a long one. We’re taking the fast route out of here but the scenic route the rest of the way. People all have crutches to carry, whether we realize it or not, you know?
I’m sure you know. You seem like you know.
I take that back. I probably confuse you. I feel like I confuse goddamnneareveryone and I know goddamnedneareveryone confuses the hell out of me from time to time, and nowadays more like always, and I mean ALWAYS, but maybe that’s everyone, who knows?
I think I’m just going to tell you right off the bat that I’m going to be an unreliable narrator from time to time. I mean, that’s always true of everyone, but I feel like if I say it right off the bat, you’ll have to forgive me for the order in which things might spew out when we’re talking down these long endless roads and into the darkest hours of night. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything about it, actually. I mean… who tells the truth about everything all the time? How do you know when the truth is coming out and when it’s a lie? How do you know what’s real and what’s not?
It’s crazy how time flies, how fast things can change, how quick lightning strikes and how life itself both becomes everything and turns to nothing in the space of a missing heart beat. The last year just turned everything upside down. I mean, Yellowstone didn’t blow up or anything and the Big One hasn’t happened in California Yet but the country did burn to the ground, literally -- there was an insane record-breaking heat wave in November and forests pretty much everywhere caught on fire, like God had finally decided it would just be easier to send us all away at once -- after the “election,” if you call it that. Liberal politicians and activists went missing, turned up murdered in the streets, the kind of violence you hear about when people talk about the Mexican cartels, and they did their best to blame the Mexican cartels for it. The Klan even started burning crosses again. People were afraid -- of everything. Of the fucking plague, of the weather, of their neighbor, of their friends, of the sirens. And I know that might sound a bit like the way things Were, but let me tell you, every time I thought it was bad, things just got worse. Until World War III broke out when Germany and the rest of the European Union somehow managed to drop four dozen bombs on The Grandest Hotel and Garden during an Individualist Party party and a few other choice venues, finally ending the nightmare - but only kind of because we still live in this world, right? And this world is … fuuuuucccccccckkkkkkkkkkkeeeed.ddddd. And I’d like to tell you now this is the story of how we save the world but … I don’t know how to do that. But I think maybe you do. And even if you don’t save the world, maybe you’ll save me, or I’ll save you, or we’ll save each other, until the time comes to say goodbye.
I know what you’re going to say. We survived all that! Be positive! It’s all better now! We’ll find a way! And yeah, that’s all true. We are on the other side of what was and now this is what was and tomorrow starts what is. Me? I’m just glad we’re in this together. I’m glad we just met. We’re going to change each other’s lives from here on out, there isn’t any two ways about it. We’ll never be the same again. We’re not going to be alone again, that’s for sure. Until we are. And then I’ll just keep you like I keep everything: on the Cloud. I guess maybe we all wind up as a million ones and zeros on someone else’s Drive.
It’s time to sleep. My eyes can’t stay open any longer, not one second. I can’t believe you’re right here next to me like this, just six inches away in my bed -- now our bed, how crazy is that? -- and that I can wrap my arm around you and feel okay in all this. I just hope it lasts, for a while.
“You know you’re a figment of my imagination, right?”
That was how we’d met, that night at Meditations, an underground “bar” that only allowed in women to give us a safe space to “escape,” if you will. My friend Katy had been the one to tell me about it, and I had gone there looking for her that night, but she hadn’t been there so I’d been people watching at first and then staring off at the lights, trying so bad to get lost in them, but Hope had been off in the corner, short with long dark brown hair like my own, kind of alone but it was also clear she knew some of the people in the room, and she had stared at my soul, right back. And instead of letting me run off she’d just come up to me and spoken the words right out of my mouth.
“I had thought the same thing about you,” I’d said, moving my hand slowly in front of her face as if to see if I was dreaming, joking, but doing what I do, too, creating separation and space between me and her.
“Well, maybe you’re right,” she’d responded. “I don’t normally start conversations with strangers so this is a little out of character for me. Maybe you’re writing my lines?”
“I hope not, I’ve got writer’s block. We could be sitting here for a while,” I’d responded, and I’d started giggling somewhat hysterically, maybe too hysterically, because I really did have writer’s block, which isn’t a great thing for a writer to have but is still better than The Plague.
“It kind of looks like a good place to sit,” she had said. “What are you on?”
“Shrooms,” I’d responded, leaning my head back against the wall, refocusing on the lights. “Just trying to get lost in the lights, for a while, clear my head, let it take me somewhere good. I don’t do this normally. Or ever, really.” I shouldn’t have said that.
“Well, maybe you should do it more often,” she’d said, sitting down right next to me, or as close to right next to me as people got these days. “And if you really want to get lost in those lights, you should take some of this too,” she’d added, holding out a tiny plastic bag with white crystals in it.”
“What is that?” I’d asked.
“A cure-all,” she said.
“A cure-all for what?”
“Whatever you need cured,” she shrugged. “It’s actually Molly. It helps take away the demons, for a little while. A tiny bit is totally safe but it tastes like horseshit combined with mercury and then it gives your brain all the serotonin it could possibly want.”
I had breathed deep. Why not? What was there to lose these days?
“Yeah okay, I’ll try that.”
NOVEL SYNOPSIS:
This is the story of Sadie, a 38-year-old novelist who just got divorced from the love of her life after years of trying to have children, who, in the midst of the world crumbling all around her, decides to be her own one-woman gypsy caravan -- that is, until miraculously meeting Hope, her new best friend, three days ago during a psychedelic binge at an underground bar she never thought she’d find herself in. Somehow Hope had smiled, and Sadie had actually smiled back, and Hope was just hooked, and nothing Sadie had seemed to say or not say had turned Hope away, and suddenly there were two.
And this is the story of Hope, Sadie’s new crazy artist friend, with whom Sadie had seemingly had nearly nothing in common, who had never been married, never wanted kids, but whose mom died during the pandemic, who just happened to be starting her whole life over -- because everyone had to start their lives over.
And Sadie is every path in life I never chose or never had and Hope is imaginary but every thing I’ve gone through and the two are getting to know each other from Sadie’s perspective on this massive road trip through a different world that bounces back toward memories of Before and moments of After, and they fall in love and think they are soul mates but eventually, in the very end, they are actually really two timelines meeting in each other’s dreams, and that’s what a soulmate really is.
So it’s a love story between myself and everything that could have been as I learn to travel into the unknown of whatever will be.