Last week, someone I know pretty well was in a terrible accident and is now in the hospital. I spent that entire day and most of the next few days processing what had happened, talking to friends, thinking about what life would be like for my family if something awful happened to one of us.
There was lots of adrenaline in my system, and the only reason I know this is because I’ve read A Discovery of Witches and the main character is always freaking out about her magic powers and excess adrenaline is always making her snap, crackle, and pop, literally. To get the adrenaline out of her system, you’d think she’d do magic, right? No. Like all good witches, she resists her natural-born powers. Instead, she rows, runs, and practices floaty, magical yoga. I barely do regular yoga, and running and rowing might as well be hang-gliding and parachuting. But I do walk my dog and listen to podcasts of NPR shows.
While we walked, I listened on my iPod to Tom Perrotta talk about his new book The Leftovers (which, BTW, sounds amazing), and about how tragic events like 9/11 (that’s been on my mind, of course, wow, can’t believe it’s been 10 years), which are so big and raw when they occur tend to fade into history (except for those directly affected, naturally). I thought about how raw I felt after this person’s accident, about how the world—at least, my tiny world—turned upside down.
When I got home from our walk, I sat at my desk, opened up a new document file, and began typing…Just a couple of paragraphs, but within minutes, I noticed something. I had stopped holding my breath. My heartbeat seemed steadier. My vision was more focused. Tragedy wasn’t yet a story, but it was the beginning of something. I know this event will fade into my personal history, but not before it becomes my fiction. Writing may not be magic yoga, but it’s even better, because with writing I can invent my own version of magic yoga. And sometimes I can even figure out how to deal with sadness.
