My Safe Person

| By Lauren Taglienti |

[Photo by Alex Azabache via Pexels]

My Safe Person

By Lauren Taglienti

He asked me how I can do that. How I can do that thing that no one’s ever done before, and do it over and over. How I write and make the industry say I’m original. One of a kind. A star. I don’t care much about that, though. And I don’t have much of an answer for how I do it. I just do it. I don’t even know what it is. All I am is a channel for whatever it is.

Since I didn’t have an answer to “how,” he asked me why: why I didn't stop. If a shark swims backwards, it dies. If I stop writing, I’ll die. So I never stop. I’m constantly scribbling down words, phrases. Stopping to chat with squirrels, to hug trees. Falling in love with the paranoia of the shake of the squirrel’s tail, the devil horns I see in the clouds. Etching down the moments in between. 

He asked me where I write. I told him everywhere, but mostly in Paris. He asked how many times I’ve been there. Twice. But mentally I’m always there. I’ve never loved a person the way I love that city. She’s always in me, flows in and out of every breath, stabs in every piercing cramp. There’s a willow tree on one of the islands in Paris. I could live under it. Write there, alongside my copy of Résister by Salomé Saqué I just bought for four euros. Like I did in May. 

I also write in my head. I have a “running script” in the back of my mind, a symptom of OCD, that constantly plays out scenes without me thinking about it at all. Writer’s block’s a mystery to me. Solutions come. 

He asked me when—so many questions all focused on me. The attention still made me uncomfortable, challenged me. I told him I’m writing right now, that talking to him is writing, that everything I do is writing. The time in between typing is where life melts into the blank spaces surrounding words on the page. Real life. Not the worlds I envision.

He asked me who I write about. Myself, obviously. But also, him. He’s in everything I write, really. He was there for me when no one else was. A trusted professional, a writer and professor who was assigned to meet with derelict kids like myself since the college’s therapy program got cut. A lifeline and an editor turned into a mentor.

He asked me to sign the book I had just brought to his office. It wasn’t my book; I was just the Production Manager for it. He’d signed one of the books he’d written and gave it to me years ago. He liked how the tables were turning. I told him I still have his book and have reread it many times.

He always told me that I was born to be a writer and insisted I never stop, but he said he still didn’t understand how I did it. He said I should be statistically dead, that so many people would’ve killed themselves if they’d been through what I had. That life itself would’ve killed many people in the same situations as me. And yet, I keep writing. Despite all the bullshit. 

He said he remembers me coming to his office hours to discuss my papers, to see what I could improve, arguing with him over periods and commas and my interpretations of texts that differed from his.

It clicked. That’s what it is, I told him. My process is to want to argue. To be angry. Angry at life. Angry at god. The patriarchy. Injustice. How whimsical squirrels are and why I can’t be like them because I have to work because I exist within capitalism and need money to survive instead of acorns. How beautiful the blades of grass are. How incredible life is. How it feels to do a kind gesture for a loved one. How enraging and invigorating it all is: there’s gasoline deep within me, and all I have to do is ignite it, and suddenly, I’m writing. Or rewriting.

Spontaneous. Not very structured. Completely imperfect. Just like life. 

He reminded me of a writing course he’s always wanted to teach: the student is in solitary quietness for three weeks and only writes to him with questions that he responds to with more questions. No verbal communication. Only writing. I told him that that’d probably help me.