I wonder if Jack Kerouac ever worried about running into someone from high school while wearing sweatpants and an old shirt he slept in. Did Virginia Woolf ever wear red lipstick when going to the grocery store on the off chance the checkout boy with the gap-toothed smile would ring up her avocados? Waiting for a changing light, willing the opening of an elevator door, trying on a sweater a size too small in a cramped and poorly lit change room — it is in these moments I wonder if I can ever be an artist. I stand in line behind a woman talking on her cellphone while I wait to order a breakfast burrito, chorizo – add guac. I watch her, speaking with frantic gesticulating motions, clad in tight black pants and a shirt displaying an expansive midriff. I watch the rings on her fingers, various crystals each of which I’m sure if I asked, she would tell me the meaning in great detail. I wonder: did Allen Ginsberg get bored? Did Charles Bukowski ever consider taking a yoga class?

When I’m on the elliptical reading Anne Carson, fifty minutes spent every third morning on a stiff and stationary machine sweating off the pita chips and hummus from the night before, I wonder, how will I ever be a poet who starves for her art? Does Esi Edugyan ever debate the merits of the Keto diet?

I see people around me and I think, Now there’s an artist. Those girls with bangs slashed short across their foreheads and gold rings pierced through their noses, outfits thrown together with careless thought. How does one make pleated white leather look so good? I stand in the crowd at a house show and look at that boy with the long and feathered hair, wearing corduroy with an ease I find shocking, admiring the way fabric clings tight to his lanky frame. I stutter in front of these people at parties, trip on flat ground, while above, a boy sits on the roof and smokes unfiltered cigarettes he rolls himself, a guitar in his lap he is strumming with lazy ease. I wonder if this is what it means to be an artist, to cultivate an aesthetic with such photogenic certainty. Did James Joyce go to parties and tell cute girls he only smokes American Spirits because the tobacco is organic?

There are many moments I have lived which will be unincluded if they ever make a biopic of my life. Then, sometimes, there are moments when I sit in the sand visiting a beachside town I once lived in, a black coffee in my hand, the sun setting over the cliffs. I smell the eucalyptus trees and the ocean air, sweet and salty. I listen to the steady hum of waves against the shore and I rest my head on a friend’s shoulder, feel their skin press against my own. In these moments, I am not thinking of Faulkner or Atwood or Diaz. In these moments I think, This would make a nice end to a story.

And sometimes it does.

Originally published in White Wall Review 42: Special Issue (2019)