there are flowers in your flaws

[People watching is my favourite way to pass the time. Here’s a few of my favourite stories under a hundred words, inspired entirely by strangers.]

The girl at the library, furiously stirring her coffee.

It was like they were always taking something from her; taking her for dinner, taking her for granted, but no one, it seemed, was ever capable of taking her seriously.

The guy in the cafeteria, pulling the lettuce out of his sandwich.

Damn your veganism, he thinks, spitefully ripping the plant-based garbage from his lunch. He can hear her chirping in his ears about getting enough roughage, blah, blah, blah, just as well as he can hear the phone ringing again, where she’ll be on the other end to tell him his catering to her new diet still isn’t enough to make her stay.

The old lady watching me in the hair salon.

She remembers warmly them being young, young enough to dance on Valentine’s night, young enough to drive to town to take the ferris wheel right to the top. Maybe they can’t dance quite as quickly anymore, but he still makes her heart beat quick and irregular like the footsteps on the circus gravel.

The man at the restaurant who laughs a little too late.

They’re all having fun. He’s glad to be able to take them out, all at once, and pay the tab and tip. But he thought there’d be more satisfaction; there was something a little disappointing when the people he’d sought to prove wrong never even noticed his victory lap.

The girl on the library floor, smiling into her homework.

I grew up a restless kid, afraid of boredom and constantly bored. Why? Because my brain didn’t shut up. I was flying a mile a minute, and the world could not keep up with me. I was like The Little Train that Could on steroids, a twelve-year-old more concerned about publishing her novel than the trivial seventh grade politics that failed to catch my attention.

Little Emily was just a shorter version of current Emily: overzealous about everything but conditioned to feel afraid of talking too much. I spent years and years ricocheting back and forth between excitement and containment, bursting to tell someone about the amazing things I found and felt, but couldn’t, because I was sure as soon as I opened my mouth, the eyes would start rolling. I noticed details, changes, I noticed the way someone's face moved as their voice shifted. Even today, my mind is still a constant whir as I work to grapple the words I need to describe all the billions of things I feel. (And there is only so much you can ramble about to your mom in the car on the way to Walmart, before she has to pull over and clear her head. She is the real MVP of this tale.)

This conflict made me lonely. It still does, despite the fact I am in a wonderful place in life, full of people as passionate as I am. How could I possibly explain the beauty I saw in the minuscule details around me if nobody else even noticed them? The way the sun feels on your neck, the mindless humming of the person beside you at the library, the perfect click of chalk tapping a blackboard. It felt for years I was stuck in myself with no way out.

In seventh grade, I carried around my precious grey notebook, the one which held what would become my very first novel. The main character was a girl called Wendi, and she was as brave and as proud as I wanted to be in myself. And I vented to Wendi, I projected my feelings onto her, I wrote into her world whatever I couldn’t grab onto in mine. She was what I wanted to be, and saw the world the same way I did. It was my own weird little liberation.

I finished her story, and it was as if I had opened a vein. I felt like I was truly good at something, finally, and that I had found what I was meant to do. Wendi was the figment of my twelve-year-old imagination and somehow, she managed to make me feel a little less alone.

And then came Maddie, then came Ana, and after came Alexis. The notebooks piled, the page counts grew, and slowly I found myself, word by word. Recently, I finished the story of Amelia, the girl with the Funny Brain, and I can finally, honestly say I am proud of my work and of myself, and I am ready to share her story with the world. (That is if the world wants to read it, of course).

As corny as it may sound, writing stories is a little bit more to me than a hobby. If I didn’t write, I wouldn’t be me. Yes, I am still an overzealous chatter-box who can’t wait to talk about Gone Girl or linguistics, but I’m not ashamed of that anymore. I feel each day like I have a real, genuine purpose; write stories so that the lonely little-train-that-could knows she’s important, not annoying.

If you’ve known me for longer than 10 minutes, you probably know I’m a writer. And if you haven’t known me for 10 minutes, well, now the cat’s out of the bag.

I realized yesterday, after a cup of coffee and a depressing walk through Chapters, that the majority of people who know I write have never read a single piece of my work, because I’ve never shared a single piece of my work. How lame is that?

So, consequently, I’m starting a blog. The idea has been kicking around in the back of my brain for over a year now, but I’ve been neglecting it, due to my nagging fear of sharing my thoughts. I don’t know what it is about writing, but there’s something so intimidating about the idea of someone else reading your inner dialogue. Maybe it’s the human fear of sucking. Maybe it really is an embarrassing thing to wear your heart (or your brain) on your sleeve. Or maybe I’m just weird.

But fearful or not, I’m sick to death of keeping everything I write to myself, so here it is. A blog. I have a few plans for this little nook, including some of my “stories under a hundred words”, things I’ve learned from kids, and most importantly, some personal anecdotes about wandering through this university-life thing. I hope somebody enjoys this blog, this little part of my funny brain I’m forcing myself to put on the internet.