There was a single quarter on the counter of the 27th Street diner, reflecting light from the bulbs overhead. Ophelia Dawkins sat in a window booth with an empty notebook in front of her, tilting her head to watch the raised planes of George Washington’s face shift between silver and stark white. It must have been new. Untarnished.
Ophelia’s mother stood with her shoes on in their living room. Her wild gestures filled the space, as did the disappointment that permeated from her furrowed brow. Their house was half of a three story duplex, all steep stairs and narrow hallways, and it only seemed to have gotten smaller.
Ophelia sank further into the sagging yellow couch, picking out a feather from one of the pillows. She rolled the soft white down between her thumb and middle finger as her mother ranted, then dropped it between the cushions.
“It was all your life ever was,” she tuned back in to hear her mother say. “You loved it so much, it was everything to you. You were that girl, the Paper Girl.”
Ophelia stared at the white radiator under the window and tried to summon up some of that same indignation to throw at her mother. She couldn’t. All she felt was resignation and, for some reason, the sense that she had betrayed someone.
“Pappy, I asked you to leave.”
A fountain of shiny black hair brushed her shoulder. She could feel Pappy’s cold breath against her bare skin as the girl watched her play solitaire on her phone from behind. “It’s not my fault. You’re the one who asked me to be here in the first place.”
Ophelia’s hands didn’t falter, she didn’t glance back over her shoulder. Perhaps if she was ignored for long enough, Pappy would just go away. Indeed, it was only a moment more before the other girl threw her hands up with an exaggerated huff. “You never give me any attention anymore.”
There is a book with a blue and yellow cover titled “The Paper Girl”. It is mostly available online, self-published, but there is one tiny bookstore in Hartmeadow, PA that always keeps a copy on the shelves. Ophelia Dawkins wrote it when she was a junior in high school; it received a bit of local press and a few people around town bought it. It was nice. It was an accomplishment.
Someone sat down in the booth across from Ophelia. She looked away from the quarter, refocusing disorientedly on a pale face with smooth skin and big cheeks. “You order yet?”
Ophelia shook her head, staring sullenly down at the open notebook in front of her. “I’m not hungry.”
“You’re not hungry or you don’t want to eat?” She eyed the notebook with a raised brow. “You working?”
“I’m working on working.” Ophelia huffed, snapping the notebook shut and swatting it away from her. Face in her hands, she grumbled, “Why are you here, Blue?”
Blue shrugged and made herself comfortable in the booth. “Thought you might enjoy my company.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, I’m certainly better than the other one.”
Ophelia laid on top of her bed, staring up at the ceiling with no particular expression. Pappy paced the floor. The harsh light from her desk lamp seemed to dull and leak as it hit her hair, like the locks were swallowing it whole.
“You’re wasting so much time,” she scolded.
Ophelia shrugged. Her covers caught against the fabric of her shirt and moved with her. “There will be more time.”
Pappy threw her hands up. “Yeah, and you’ll waste that too! You could be getting so much done but all you ever do is sit around.”
Ophelia shrugged again.
Like a tether of restraint had snapped within her, Pappy launched at Ophelia’s ankles, shaking her furiously. “Get up!”
Ophelia thought writer’s block was a bit like trying to catch falling leaves. You thought you were right there under it, then it fell to the ground beside you. You couldn’t get a grasp on it and you didn’t know why.
It was a bit like paralysis. Everything’s there but you can’t reach for it.
It was a bit like beating at the inside of your head, screaming at yourself to do something.
It was a bit like not being able to find the perfect metaphor.
When the days were yellow, her head was peaceful and she could do whatever she wanted. Leaves were raindrops and they soaked her to the bone.
There were no metaphors, just the life she had.
“In any case, you don’t want to be alone.”
“Yes I do,” Ophelia insisted, folding her arms across her chest as if to prove her point. As if it could keep Blue out.
“Then why aren’t you?”
“I was.” Smugly, she added, “Maybe if I was alone I could actually get some work done.”
Blue leveled her with a look. It was the kind of look that took something out of a person, that laid them bare. “Stop lying to yourself.”
Ophelia flinched back. Blue’s lips pinched, but she didn’t try to apologize. She had hit a nerve and she knew it.
Ophelia shut down. It was an interesting transformation to observe. There was emotion and then there wasn’t. Like someone had packed their things and called a cab. A merchant closing up shop. Back in 15 minutes.
She looked out the window of the diner, not acknowledging Blue even when she grabbed her hand over the table.
“Ophelia. Where are you?”
When Ophelia was in third grade, she had an idea. She pictured a world just like her own and a little girl named Courtney just like her. Courtney had a horse but not a mom. One day, she discovered her mom was actually alive and was the queen of a magical kingdom in the sky. The people in this kingdom had special mental connections with their horses, who were actually pegasi. Courtney’s horse brought her to the kingdom, which was under attack from an evil dark lord. Courtney had to unite the different species in the kingdom and lead them into battle.
Ophelia had created an entire world for the story. She dreamed up magical creatures to live in the kingdom and even drew a map. She planned the entire plot in her spiral pink notebook with the glossy purple flowers on the cover.
Ophelia found the notebook again when she was cleaning out the attic of their house. She had just graduated college and was moving into her first apartment, the one she would share with Yellow. Their first home.
Her mother had asked her to take her things out of the attic, either bring them to the apartment or throw them away. Yellow was helping her, if helping meant sitting in front of the same cardboard box for an hour and commenting on each childhood trinket she found without offering up any advice on where it should go. Technically, she was the one who found the notebook.
Ophelia recognized the cover immediately, and abandoned the pile of objects she had been mindlessly sorting without the care one should take when examining the fabric of her life. Yellow was a lot more indecisive than Ophelia, much more sentimental. She cooed when she found the notebook, flipping through its pages.
“Your handwriting,” she laughed. “It’s barely legible.”
Ophelia sat down beside her, taking half of the notebook in her lap. “In all fairness, I was eight.” The pages were brittle and fragile with age, and she took care when turning them. In the front of the book was a table of contents, which made Yellow laugh out loud.
They came across the first chapter of the story and Ophelia watched Yellow read it. There was an extreme, tender fondness in her honey-brown eyes. She looked up at Ophelia with the type of smile that made her feel like a kid again. “You were good. Even back then.”
“It was a stupid idea,” Ophelia shrugged, taking back the notebook with a small smile. She ran her hand across the pages gently. She wondered if, after all these years, the pencil would still smudge under her hands if she touched it too roughly.
Yellow leaned her chin on Ophelia’s shoulder, her breath coming out in hot puffs as she laughed softly. “It was you.”
Sometimes thinking about a certain person can make your breath catch. The way they smile, or the way their hand feels in yours, or the calm, quiet stillness of a dark room when you’ve stayed up all night in bed, talking about the monsters you used to be afraid of. The gray light of early dawn is the only thing illuminating their profile, but you could have carved it out of stone. Your hands trace that shape in your sleep.
Some people you just love with every part of you. In the moments of purest joy, your heart swells with their kindness and sunshine. In the moments of strife, you reach for them to be your support, your north star, as you would be theirs willingly. Even in the darkest moments, when all the ugly parts of you rear their heads and become seek-and-destroy missiles like they have so many times in the past, you don’t let it get the best of you. You let the anger evaporate before it can suffocate you both, sit down, take their hands in your own. ‘Let’s figure this out. Why are we angry? Am I being fair to you?’ That’s all you want with this person. To love them in a way that is as good for them as they have been for you. To be just, and mature, and free of toxicity. This is the first time you think you know how to love someone right.
Ophelia smiled and shrugged again. Turning her head, she brushed a kiss against Yellow’s cheekbone. “It was.” She looked back at the notebook, flipping a few pages until the sheets were blank and clean. “I don’t think I ever got past the first chapter.”
Yellow shrugged and leaned back. “It doesn’t really matter. It’s the idea that counts.”
If Ophelia’s mother had been there, she would have made a snide comment about her not finishing much of anything anymore. If Pappy had been there, she would have snapped at Ophelia that ideas were worthless unless you did something with them. If Ophelia were alone, she would have told herself that she was a failure for giving up on writing.
But Yellow would never have said anything like that. She was always encouraging, always understanding. She never pressured Ophelia into anything, never pushed her past her limits. She would never look at Ophelia and see a failure. Ophelia had no idea why, but for some reason Yellow looked at her and saw magic.
“Ophelia.”
Ophelia drew her eyes away from the raindrops running marathons down the diner window and back to Blue. Blue didn’t see magic when she looked at her. She saw a human being, and a very flawed one at that. When Blue’s eyes were on her, she felt flawed.
Ophelia shut her eyes against this magic-annihilating gaze, her voice coming out low and angry. “Can you please go?”
“No, I’m not leaving you alone.”
“You don’t even like me,” Ophelia muttered, eyes drifting open.
Blue crossed her arms, leaning across the table to look up at Ophelia intensely. “Calling you out on your shit doesn’t mean I don’t like you. Just because I don’t think you’re perfect doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Look at me. You know you have faults. I know you have them. Pretending you don’t isn’t love.”
“I’m trying,” Ophelia croaked, leaning across the table imploringly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know I should be writing, I want to write. I want that feeling again, but it’s not there. There are no stories left in me.”
“That’s not true.”
The curtains Ophelia and Yellow hung in their first house were covered in vines and flowers. They brightened the space more than Ophelia would have expected from something so simple. She traced her eyes down the embroidery, her hands absently kneading the arches of Yellows’s feet.
Yellow threw her head back over the arm of the couch. “I can’t believe we actually got it all set up.”
“We still have to unpack the kitchen,” Ophelia pointed out.
Yellow shrugged and snuggled into Ophelia’s shoulder. “That feels like tomorrow’s problem.”
Ophelia looked fondly at the top of Yellow’s head. Her gaze wandered around the room, a weird mixture of furnished and barren, their lives halfway out of boxes. Yellow had set up the bookshelf in the living room while Ophelia and the movers carted boxes up three sets of New York steps, and one particular detail caught her eye.
“Is that my book?”
Yellow looked up at the shelf, seeming surprised herself. “Yeah. I found it in one of the boxes and thought it would be a perfect place to display it.” She looked up at Ophelia, the picture of innocent intentions. “You don’t mind, right?”
The blue and yellow cover was front and center on the shelf, proudly held up by a couple trinkets. It was impossible to miss, as was the name printed on the front and the inevitable questions it would provoke. Ophelia could hear them now. Every guest they had over, every family member, every casual acquaintance, they would all want to know about the book.
She shook herself off, gave Yellow a calm smile before she could see the internal whirlwind.
“No, not at all.”
Ophelia snuck into the living room that night and moved it. She wedged it between two thick books on the top shelf, barely visible.
Yellow never said anything about it.
Ophelia sank down into the booth, avoiding eye contact with Blue as much as she could.
“It’s like there’s this gap,” she tried to explain. “There’s this gap between wanting to write and actually doing it. I have all this motivation, all this inspiration, but the second I try to actually do it, that all evaporates. It’s been like this ever since.”
The sympathy in Blue’s look would have been a lot more believable if it hadn’t been tinted with so much skepticism. “It was like this way before that and you know it.”
The apartment that Yellow and Ophelia moved into had a big window in the living room overlooking the street below. There was always something new and colorful to see. Yellow had said it would be a perfect view for writing, so that’s where they set up Ophelia’s desk with her laptop and notebooks and favorite coaster. She was right, too. It was a perfect view for writing.
Except for the starkly blank screen and blinking cursor. She sat there every morning, trying to establish a routine to improve her discipline, but all that routine consisted of so far was sitting for a few minutes, hating herself, and then playing solitaire on her phone.
She was in the midst of starting a new game once realizing she was never going to win her current one, when a crash came from the kitchen.
A quick investigation found Yellow trying to put their pans back into the cabinet they had fallen out of. She looked up at Ophelia, cross-legged on the linoleum. She smiled.
So Ophelia laughed and helped her put the pans away and the two of them danced around the kitchen while they made breakfast and then left the plates soaking in the sink while they drifted between napping and watching TV on the couch and the page remained blank.
Ophelia looked at Yellow’s calm face as she watched the television, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a teenage girl with hair blacker than ink and skin like an old book shake her head and, with tears in her eyes, leave through the front door.
There’s a lot of stories about artists suffering. Be it the strife of such a turbulent and unstable career or the overwhelming perfectionism or the isolation. It’s almost romantic. Great writing always seems to be fueled by tragedy. You lose someone you love, you write about it. You suffer a breakup, you write about it. The voices in your head get so loud and so cruel that you think you’re going to be swallowed whole by this anguish, you write about it.
No one ever talks about how you can be happy and write about it. Maybe they don’t talk about it because you can’t. Maybe in order to be great you must be suffering.
When the days were yellow, writing was harder than it had ever been. It was difficult to create a new world when Ophelia loved the one she had so much. Writing had always been her escape, but what happens when she doesn’t want to escape? What do you do with a safehouse when the whole world is safe?
“Maybe I just can’t do it anymore,” Ophelia admitted. “Maybe too much has happened. Maybe I’ve changed too much and the writing is just… gone.”
Blue’s lips pursed. “I suppose it’s possible.”
“You weren’t supposed to say that,” Ophelia groaned. She folded her arms across the table and fell into them.
“I think you need to stop worrying so much about how things are supposed to be.” Blue reached across and pulled Ophelia’s hands out from under her chin and held them close. “Look at me.”
Ophelia looked at her.
“If you can look me in the eyes and tell me that you don’t love writing anymore, that it’s not what you want from your life, that your passion for it is genuinely gone, then that’s okay. You never have to write again. I officially free you from guilt if you never write again.”
Ophelia snorted, but didn’t pull her hands away. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“Why not?”
Ophelia tried to ignore her mother as much as possible that Christmas. It had been barely a week since her life had fallen apart and she wasn’t quite ready for the litany of lectures and list of things she could have done better that was surely awaiting in her mother’s throat.
She was cornered, eventually though, on the living room couch. Her mother asked how she was doing, her gaze deceptively sympathetic and her mouth pinched with pity. Ophelia shrugged and said she was getting along. Her mother asked if she could afford the apartment by herself. Ophelia shrugged and said she was getting along. Her mother paused, and then she asked if she had been writing.
Ophelia shrugged.
She didn’t tell her mother that she had barely written a word in three months. She didn’t tell her mother that when she tried to focus on her thoughts too hard, they didn’t even form sentences. She didn’t tell her mother that when she thought about writing, nothing inside her moved. It was all still, too still, not like calm waters but like the parched air in a drought.
She said she was getting along.
Pappy was sitting on Ophelia’s bed upstairs after dinner. She held the book with the blue and yellow cover in her hands and was crying.
She looked up at Ophelia and the betrayal in her eyes was staggering. “You abandoned me.” Ophelia opened her mouth to protest but Pappy just barrelled over her. “You promised you loved me, that you would always love me. But you lied.”
“It wasn’t a lie. It’s just changed.”
“How? How can love just change like that?”
` “I don’t know!” Ophelia screamed. “But the constant pressure from you doesn’t do jack shit!”
“What am I supposed to do? Just lie down and let you ruin your life?”
“I’m not trying to ruin my life, I’m trying to figure out how to live it. I am drowning over here, Pappy. I can’t be worried about you right now.”
“Well, you can’t just create me and then not worry about me!”
“I wish I hadn’t created you! I wish you had never even existed.”
Pappy looked at her like there was blood on her hands. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
“I thought I knew who I was.” Ophelia was surprised when the words came out choked and thick. She didn’t expect the pressure behind her eyes or the tremble in her voice, but she couldn’t squander it.
Blue reached over and brushed her hair out of her eyes. Ophelia didn’t expect the pieces to drag with dampness across her face. “You did know who you were, at the time. Not a lot of people can say that. But you’ve changed and you’re just going to have to learn who you are all over again.”
“I promised,” Ophelia gasped out. “I promised myself that it was what I loved, that I would always love it.”
“Oh, Lia,” Blue looked at her with such extreme sadness that it forced the tears to stream freely down Ophelia’s face. “You can’t promise to be someone.”
Her brother found her on the roof outside her childhood bedroom later that night. Their family was downstairs, getting wine drunk and talking about when they were kids. Ophelia had left after that. She was fed up with discussions of who she used to be.
He had brought out an opened bottle of Merlot with him. In his sophomore year of college, he was finally starting to seem less like her little brother and more like a man. He had been taller than her since he started high school, but it was almost easy to mistake him for their father now. It must have been in the way he held himself, like a man who knew how to do laundry and pay taxes and love someone.
“You okay?”
“Just needed some air.”
“Mom’s at it again with the writing?”
“When isn’t she?”
He sat beside her. He didn’t ask about her writing or about Yellow leaving or about life in the city. He just uncorked the bottle and drank straight from it.
He passed the bottle into her hands, wiping his mouth with his white shirt sleeve. Their mother would have been appalled. It made Ophelia smile.
“How have you been?” She asked him.
He shrugged. “Not bad. I still haven’t picked a major yet. It’s kind of starting to stress me out.”
“Don’t let it worry you too much. That won’t help anything.”
“I just don’t know what I want to do.” He looked over, studying her for a long time. “Are you going to get pissy if I ask about how you knew you wanted to write?”
Ophelia took another drink, buying herself time. Finally, she decided to just be honest. “Probably, but you can ask. I get pissy about most things these days.”
“So how did you know?” He took the bottle back.
She tried to think of a response. Her heavy exhale came out in a puff, twirling up into the sky. “Because I look at that, just frosty breath in the night air, and I see poetry. I ride the train and I see a single chair on the back porch of a house on the tracks and there’s a story there, automatically in my head. For a lot of my life, I knew because I just knew. Because it was a part of me.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know anymore.”
“You just don’t like writing anymore?”
“No, I don’t. I fucking hate it. But I need it. The stories, they’re all still there. They don’t go away. And I want to write. I can’t turn that off. There’s nothing like it. I need it. I love it. But I don’t fucking like it.”
“Well, everyone has writer’s block.”
Ophelia laughed. It seemed like such a trivial name for it, so minimizing, like her whole soul wasn’t being drawn and quartered.
“I’m serious,” he insisted. “Everyone goes through blocks. In the nicest way possible, Lia, you’re not special. But you are lucky. Not everyone has something like that. Something where, no matter how much it sucks and how much it hurts sometimes, you love it still. And you want to work through it still. But you genuinely do have a passion for writing. And maybe the exact feeling for it changed, but the passion is still there. You wouldn’t be beating yourself up over it if it wasn’t.”
“It just used to be so easy.”
“Being mediocre is easy. Having a passion, a calling, a need to do something or be something is never going to be easy. Just because it’s not as easy as it was before doesn’t mean it’s not as good.”
He took one last, long sip and handed her the bottle. Straightening out his slacks as he stood, he started walking back towards the window. “You’re still growing up, Lia, like it or not. That’s never easy.”
“I know you thought you were always going to feel a certain way. But things change. People change. And falling out of love is a lot harder than anyone ever warns you. But you can’t hate yourself for not being the person you once thought you would be. No one can promise who they’ll be or what they’ll want or how they’ll feel in the future. You were excited once, with Pappy. Then you resented her. You were in love once, with Yellow. Now you’re heartbroken. Everything changes. Nothing is guaranteed.
“You have to forgive yourself, Ophelia. You can’t hold onto this guilt forever. If you still love writing, if it’s truly what you want, then it’s not too late to make yourself into someone who can do it. But you have to forgive yourself. Writing is a part of you. If you don’t forgive yourself, you can’t forgive it. And until you forgive it, you can’t love it.”
There’s a tree in Ophelia’s backyard with purple flowers. When she was younger, and still romanticized the idea of a “writing place”, she used to write under that tree. It was the perfect place because it matched the flowers on her lavender notebook.
It was under that tree that she found Pappy. She was standing, looking up at the flowers. Her face bore the marks of tear tracks, but she was no longer crying. Her expression was clean, neutral. Awaiting.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry about what I said inside, I didn’t mean it. I was just angry, mostly at myself. But you were wrong. I didn’t abandon you, and I didn’t stop loving you. I’ve just changed. I’m not the same girl I was when I wrote the story about the pegasus kingdom. And I’m not the girl I was when I wrote you. But both girls are still a part of me. You are still a part of me, Pappy. You just can’t be all of me anymore.”
Pappy finally looked down at her. She was quiet for a long time, they both were. Then she nodded, said “Okay,” and walked away.
Ophelia Dawkins sat alone in the 27th Street diner, looking at a quarter on the counter. Her pen tapped relentlessly against the blank notebook page before her, until she stopped and clicked it.
Eve Annajane Writes, LLC 