Three Failed Attempts

                                                                                                                                             Cassia Hameline

                                                                                                                                                              595 words

Inspiration: my lack thereof. I tried to write about coffee, then men/sex, then alcohol,

but each time it didn’t feel right. This is the product of those attempts.

 

 

Three Failed Attempts

 

An email from my grad school professor: write about three things. She lists examples—three highways, three sweatshirts, three favorite songs. I start my own list: states, spices, shades of blue. Three days of thinking and my page is still blank. It’s eight p.m. when I sit down to try again. I breathe, shift my focus from the prompt to the present, concentrate on the clotted cream in my stale morning coffee cup. And maybe this is it, I think.

So I begin.

I write about the quiet of my apartment, how the sun streams in slants onto old wooden floors, the large oak tree centered in the front yard; coffee number one. Then there’s the cup in New Orleans, Café Du Monde, where I sat across from my then-boyfriend in silence, sunlight streaming in slants against the café’s white walls, never getting an apology for leaving me alone on Bourbon Street when he’d gotten too drunk and curious the night before. I pull at threads between that day and today but find myself caught up in the strings and before I know it I’m writing about men.

So I start over.

I write about Spencer. I write about the way he entranced and intoxicated and suffocated me for years. I write about the way he built me into a girl he wanted, then broke her when she wasn’t right. When I write about the songs he played on guitar while we drank cheap Malbec from the bottle, I’m on to man number two. Casey, who played me to sleep the night of my best friends’ wedding when I’d gotten too drunk and the Uber driver had to pull over so I could throw up on the side of the highway. Back in his hotel room he’d unlaced my heels, dressed me in his boxers and flannel, fingerpicked Pink Floyd songs until my mind turned off. I look for more threads, for ways to connect these two men to a third, but I’ve already put on “Comfortably Numb” and poured myself a glass of cabernet and suddenly I can’t write any more about men.

So I start over.

I write about the wine that makes me feel sexy in a stained wifebeater in my dirty kitchen. I write about chilled shots of tequila taken with strangers at the bar two doors down the street on sweltering summer nights. I write about crystal glasses of Bulleit Bourbon drank with my neighbor while the sun fell hot and orange behind an oak tree. And I keep going, on to my first sip of Burnett’s in a basement, peppermint schnapps for dirty girlscouts at a bachelorette party, too many picklebacks when I visited the city last winter. And I keep going on to dirty martinis and frozen margaritas, craft IPAs and gas station tallboys, gin and vodka drank straight from the bottle when my father wasn’t looking, and I keep going until my glass is emptied and my head is spinning and my page holds more than just three drinks, and so do I, and I think, I need to start over; or maybe just stop because maybe tomorrow will be a better day to write, maybe, but probably not, and how many glasses have I had now and why’s it hot as shit in here and where’s a damn guitar-playing god when you need one and screw whoever said third try’s the charm and I told myself I wasn’t even going to drink tonight and what time is it anyways and fuck it I’m going to bed.