She’d put the pages in a folder and then ignored them for nearly two weeks. That wasn’t the same as avoiding of course, because she’d walked past them dozens of times and managed to look at the folder no problem. Had put her keys down on top of it once and felt as if that shouldn’t have been a thing. So it wasn’t that she’d forgotten what those pages were. Rather the opposite.
Twenty-six pages. Not much for two years. Still a thing she’d been writing instead of the other things she was supposed to write. The thing that had started as an experiment in a notebook and then had turned into something she couldn’t explain to anyone, including herself.
She finally picked the folder up one day, and she thought: Nadia.
Not her agent. No, Nadia, who had been her closest friend for twenty years and who was not a writer and had told her once that she didn’t understand why anyone would choose to spend that much time alone inside their own head.
Nadia, who was the only person she knew who would say exactly what she thought.
She put the folder in her bag before she could talk herself out of it…
Nadia had a flat on the top floor of a building with a broken entry buzzer that she’d long stopped bothering to get her landlord to fix. You actually had to ring her mobile to be let in. How she ever got deliveries was beyond her, but whatever. So she stood on the wet pavement, her bag over her shoulder, and looked up at the lit window while nearly accidentally calling her mother instead.
Nadia finally came down in that cardigan that had a small hole in its elbow.
“Ruth.” She let her in without asking questions and they got upstairs. When they were inside, she made tea and then handed Ruth the mug while it was still too hot to drink. Afterwards, she stood at the counter eating biscuits straight out the packet.
“I have something,” Ruth said.
“All right,” she mumbled while chewing.
“I don’t know if it’s any good.”
“All right.” Again. She set the biscuits down while Ruth got the folder out of her bag and put it on the table.
Nadia looked at it. Then at Ruth. “Is this the thing you’ve been not-talking about?”
“Yup.”
“Right.” Nadia pulled out a chair and sat down. She didn’t reach for the folder, and Ruth was grateful for that. “Do you want me to read it now, or…”
“No. Not now.” Ruth picked up her mug, which was still too hot. “Just... Someone should know it exists.”
Nadia looked at her for a moment. “Well,” she said. “It obviously exists.” She picked up the folder and set it on top of the pile of things at the end of the table. Letters mostly, and a library book with a broken spine. A battery that presumably needed replacing in something rolled off the pile, and Ruth caught it before it landed on the floor.
They talked about other things, like the new downstairs tenant who played the bass but didn’t seem to care that bass travels through ceilings and floors. Not great at one in the morning apparently. Ruth ate a few biscuits but forgot to drink her tea until it was cold…
She walked back through the meadows. The path through the wet grass was lit in intervals, dark between each light. Somehow, that made Ruth think about the chapter she hadn’t been able to get right. She’d been leaving it alone; something about a problem she couldn’t let anyone else see being a problem she also couldn’t look at herself, she supposed.
She had some writing to do…
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