Adam Gnade

BY ADAM GNADE

On the last day of December, you go out walking by yourself and hear the snow crunch under your boots and see the fog hang over the valley and the skeletons of trees lining the creek. Now the house is quiet and you’re the only one awake. This is what you wanted, James, you tell yourself. This is the world you’ve been looking for. Try and get your head straight to write. When you got here you felt like an escaped prisoner, liberated, enthused, but now this is your life and you need to make it work. “When the measure of your work/is the measure of your worth/then you better make it work.” Man, you liked that song a lot and you believed it with conviction. (At one point Ethan thought that line was yours. How proud you were. Those are binder lines, you decided; the lines kids write on their school binders. You’ve been after that ever since.)

Now you need to move forward without distraction. Push away all extraneous thought until you see the story. Find the ticket for that world you’re making and then find the bus station and get there. But some mornings it’s slow. You tell yourself that: It’s slow. I’m slow. No, IT’S slow. It’s not me. It’s a separate thing. I’ll get there but it’s me who needs to do the pushing.

You tell yourself you’re missing out, that back home in Portland the New Year’s Eve party is busting out, delirious, alive, flush-faced, drunk on its own promise. That’s okay. I need to work more than I need parties. Parties… you forget parties by the time the next one comes around. I don’t need parties or the people who go to them. I don’t need anything. “I am a rock/I am an island,” goes that song you always hated. But sometimes you were honest and you knew it was about you and that made you nervous. You saw yourself becoming that thing that doesn’t feel, that writes and thinks and reads and is alone and cold as death and touches nothing and loves no one. Find the bus ticket. Find the station. Go…