There are moments in a New York writer’s life that just don’t cut it for great literature, ya know? Not every experience deserves to be captured in elegant prose.
Take, for instance, the morning I spent twenty minutes tryin’ to explain to my neighbor that I ain’t home all day to accept his packages just because I work from home. “But you’re there anyway,” he says with a matter-of-factness that left me speechless. I’m writin’ a novel about the manipulation of modern man, but about this? About this you don’t write.
Or the moment at the coffee shop when the barista wrote “Crow” on my cup, even though I clearly said “Crowl.” I’m too proud to correct it, but too vain to accept “Crow.” So now I stand there every time in silence, waitin’ for my flat white, while a small existential crisis rages inside. Is this literature? Nah. Is it my life? Unfortunately, yeah.
Then there was this Tuesday when I spent half an hour craftin’ a particularly eloquent text to my agent, only to realize I sent it to my mother. Her response: “???” That ain’t gonna be no Pulitzer novel.
And of course there’s the thing with the mailman who’s been insistin’ for three years that I’m someone named “Mr. Pratch.” I stopped correctin’ him. Sometimes I even accept his mail. Maybe I’m secretly Mr. Pratch. Maybe that’s my true identity. But would I write a book about it? Fuggedaboutit.
No, a serious New York writer writes about the big themes: identity, loss, the search for meaning in urban chaos. Not about the fact that last week at the supermarket I accidentally bought the organic avocados instead of the regular ones, and now all week at breakfast I’m thinkin’: “Five bucks for one avocado? Am I enlightened now or what?”
These are the invisible chapters, the unwritten pages of everyday life. But maybe, just maybe, it’s exactly these moments that tell us more about life than any great novel.
But shh – about this you don’t write.
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