My buddy, DT, texts me and our other buddy, Kevin, that he has an idea.
I have an idea, he texts.
I like ideas. I stare at the message. I stare at my phone.
Either DT is waiting for Kevin or I to ask what the idea is, or he’s in the middle of typing the idea itself and we’re waiting for him. It’s asshole or dumbass either way. There’s no reason for an “I have an idea” warning shot preview other than to let anticipation for said idea build.
I stare at the message on my phone, one or the other or the other or all of us waiting.
Finally the follow-up. The idea.
We should write something together again, DT texts.
Not much, for that much waiting. Not much, as far as ideas go. But it isn’t nothing. I have an idea, DT texted, and thus an idea had been let-there-be-light’ed into existence. Just like that. The world could be magical and mystical and full of wonder, if you let it. If you let yourself believe.
I love it, Kevin says.
I’m in, I say.
We’re wizards, DT says.
What the fuck are you talking about, I say.
Fuck yeah, Kevin says.
It goes on like that for a while. Sometimes DT or Kevin say something that makes me text back lol and sometimes one of them says something that actually makes me lol and sometimes one of them says something that makes me text back and tell them I’d actually, literally lol’ed. The whole rest of the day is just cycles of versions of that, over and over and over and over and over until I go to bed.
The next morning, I wake up with an idea. I have an idea! I text DT and Kevin, chuckling at myself, at the absurdity of our groupchat, at how nonsensical and senseless writing is, at the ridiculousness and meaninglessness and stupidity of the entirety of existence.
I don’t tell DT or Kevin my idea, leaving them waiting for me, and they never respond, leaving me waiting for them. Assholes and dumbasses, all of us.
I get straight to writing the idea. Only, it’s gone. Lost, stolen, forgotten, vanished by the magician of the universe. Maybe it had never existed in the first place, and I’d made it all up. Who knows for how long and what all about I’d been lying to myself.
I go to campus and teach my classes and a student comes to office hours and asks how to know what to write about. How to come up with ideas. I tell her, at length and with a confidence and charisma that sells everything I say as honest and pure and irrefutably true.
Later, home, after dinner, everyone on social media is talking about a book review decrying the teaching of creative writing. How it saps your imagination and intellect and creativity and probably other qualities of being a good writer and interesting person, too. It actually makes you a bad person, it seems to go so far as to at least imply. On top of all that, it pays poorly.
I don’t agree—no one posting about it does—except for the poor pay part, no one can argue with that, but also I’ve been struggling figuring out what else to believe in, so why not try this on?
I type out an email to my boss that I am quitting, but then don’t send it, letting it save itself to my drafts. I email my students that classes for the rest of the semester are canceled, they all get As. Go live life, I tell them. Be curious, chase your interests and obsessions, be unabashed about joy, figure out the life that makes sense to you.
I buy a new car, a boat of a car, because it feels like a good idea and also because I wrote that line in a story once and so that made it feel true and like something I should do. I drive around the country, visiting friends and meeting strangers. I ask them to tell me stories, and they do, and I ask them where I should go next, and they tell me, and that’s where I go.
I become a follower of multiple religions and denounce others, and then I baptize myself in those I’d denounced, and then I leave them all behind me and continue my search for answers or salvation or forgiveness or truth or an idea or whatever it is I’m seeking.
I buy a boat and I learn how to sail. I fall in love with my sailing instructor and we sail around the world, making love and bearing witness to the beauty all around us, identifying and naming and defining our own aesthetics. We fall out of love and go our separate ways, but with our lives made richer in ways neither of us will ever forget nor take for granted.
I learn to not fear death. And then I learn that, in some circumstances, you should indeed fear death, a follow-up lesson that makes it even easier and more reassuring to not fear death.
I learn that there are stories everywhere, and beauty everywhere, and magic everywhere, and also that everything can be a story and can be beautiful and can be magic.
And then I write all that down, which was my idea, which is this story right here.
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Aaron Burch wrote a book with his buddies Kevin and DT but they only printed 50 copies and they’re sold out and you probably didn’t get one. Sorry. You can read this as a treat though. He does some other stuff, too. He also needs to update his website. Next up on his TBR pile is Shelby Hinte’s Howling Women, which you can read an excerpt of here on RL.
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image: Aaron Burch
Rejection Letters 