August 29

August 29, Tuesday.

He writes the date and sits for a moment before writing anything else. This is not his usual mode — he writes the date and moves directly into the content, the date as header rather than pause. But today he sits with the date.

Twenty-six years, two months, and some days. He has been alive for that long. He has been writing for eleven years, which is almost half of that. He has been in Springfield for three years. He has been at the desk in this apartment for three years.

He thinks: he has been writing longer than he has been in any single city.

The writing is the longest relationship he has.

He writes: The work has been there before the apartment and before Springfield and before Portland and before the move back from East Longmeadow and before everything that has

changed. The work was in Holyoke. The work was in the sublet in Portland. The work has been the constant against which everything else is a variable.

He reads it back.

He thinks: this is the thing I have been trying to say for eleven years in different language.

He writes it again, more precisely: He has been writing longer than he has lived anywhere. The writing is where he lives.

He keeps both versions.

* * *

He has a bad morning and a good afternoon on the same day, which is either the body evening itself out or the specific mercy of a practice that does not require you to be consistently anything in order to keep going.

The morning: the dream again, the waking at 3, the 3 to 6 in the chair. He does not write during those hours. He sits. He breathes. He does the inventory and then he does it again because the first time does not take. He watches the street. He waits.

By 6 the body has come back to something closer to its operating normal. He makes coffee. He goes to the desk. He opens the notebook and

writes three pages that are not good — that are the writing of someone who has been awake since 3 and whose body is running on insufficient resources and whose mind is doing its best given the conditions. He keeps the three pages. He marks them in the corner: 3 AM morning. Keep but do not use.

He eats breakfast. Actual breakfast, eggs, the thing he makes on the days when the body needs more than cereal. He takes the walk. He comes back.

He sits at the desk at 10.

And then: something shifts. He has no better word for it. The quality of attention changes. The sentences start doing what they should do. He writes for two hours and produces six pages and four of them are good, real good, the kind of good that reminds him why the bad mornings are worth it.

He reads the four pages.

He thinks: these four pages exist because of the 3 AM. The 3 AM is not the enemy of the work. The 3 AM is the compost. The good pages grow from it.

He does not know if this is true or if he is making the narrative more coherent than the reality warrants. He knows that the good pages

exist alongside the 3 AM, in the same body, on the same day. He keeps both.

* * *

He calls his friend Marcus on a Sunday evening.

He does not have many people he calls. The ones he calls, he calls intentionally. Marcus is a writer — different genre, different world, but a writer, which means he understands certain things without requiring explanation. Marcus lives in Boston. They have been in each other’s lives since a literary event four years ago where they ended up at the same table and talked for three hours.

Marcus answers on the fourth ring. He sounds like he has been writing, which is the specific distraction of someone whose mind is in a document and has been asked to exit the document.

Vincent says: bad time?

Marcus says: no, just finishing a thought. Give me thirty seconds.

Thirty-two seconds of keyboard sounds.

Marcus says: okay. What’s up?

Vincent says: bad week. Just checking in.

They talk for an hour. About the writing, which is the common ground and the starting

place for all their conversations. About the specific difficulty of the week Vincent has been having — not the details, but the shape, which Marcus understands without the details because he has had versions of his own shape. About what the work is doing right now for each of them, which is the most honest way Vincent knows how to take his own temperature.

Marcus says: you keeping the notebooks going?

Vincent says: always.

Marcus says: then you’re okay.

It is not a small thing, to be told by someone who knows what the notebooks are and what they mean that you are okay because the notebooks are going. It is not the same as a doctor telling him he is okay. It is something Vincent has more access to than a doctor.

He says: yeah. I think so.

They hang up.

He goes to the desk.

He lays the notebook flat.

He moves forward.

* * *

The first time his writing appeared in print somewhere he did not control, he found out by accident.

He was twenty, sitting in the library at the community college where he had taken two classes that semester — not as a degree program, just because the classes were there and he wanted to learn things that the libraries could not teach him alone. He was reading a literary magazine that someone had left on the table, a regional publication out of Northampton, and on page 34 he found a poem.

The poem was his.

He read it twice to be sure. The first reading: disbelief. The second reading: recognition. The line breaks were different — the editor had made changes he had not approved — but the poem was his, from a submission he had sent six months ago and had never heard back from and had assumed was rejected.

He sat in the library for a long time.

He took out his phone and found the magazine’s contact page. He wrote an email that was very controlled and very polite, asking about the process, explaining that he had not been notified of acceptance, noting the changes

to his line breaks without characterizing them as a violation.

They apologized. The acceptance email had gone to spam. They offered to publish a corrected version in the next issue. They asked if he had more work to submit.

He submitted three pieces.

They published two.

He has not always controlled how his work appears once it leaves his hands. He has learned to make peace with this — not full peace, not the peace of someone who does not care, but the working peace of someone who understands that publishing is a collaboration and collaborations involve compromise and the alternative is not publishing.

He always submits his preferred version. He always notes his preferences clearly. He accepts what is within his control to accept.

He keeps writing.

He keeps submitting.

He keeps at it.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. Time is what publishing costs.

He has learned to divide himself. Writing on one side. Everything else on the other. He does not love the everything else. He does it because the work demands it. He would rather write. He always does both.

He lifts the pen.

He stays with it.

He holds the pen still and looks.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. Not yet editing. First: is this the right thing? Is it going the right direction? Is the language alive? He reads it back slowly. The day is somewhere else now. The apartment has gone quiet. He rolls his neck. Breathes. Ghost opens one eye from the couch. Closes it. Vincent puts his hands flat on the desk. He looks at what is there. The language survives the moment that made it necessary. That is why he does this.

That is why he does not stop. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He takes up the pen again.

The line arrives.

He has never not written the next line.