On Letting Go and Mary Oliver — a writer’s diary entry, 3rd of July

Rain since morning, the good kind, straight down, no wind in it. I didn’t go to the desk until eleven. Told myself it was the rain.

Seren still isn’t right in this chapter. She’s supposed to be walking away from the Court and I keep writing it like a decision, all spine and clarity, and it reads false every time I go back over it. I deleted four pages last night. I read Oliver instead, the one everyone has by heart before they’ve read anything else of hers. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. I copied it out years ago into the notebook I keep for lines, not for me.

I keep thinking about how easy she makes it sound. Not the writing. The doing. As if the animal wasn’t the one who got hurt in the first place.

That’s the chapter’s problem, I think. I’ve written Seren deciding, when what actually happens to people is closer to a held breath finally giving out. Nobody puts that in a book because it doesn’t look like anything happening on the page. But it’s the true version. I know it is. I left something once like that myself, not with a door slammed but with my hands just not being able to hold on any longer, and it took me the better part of a year to stop calling it failure.

A letter came this week, forwarded through the agency, from a girl who said the last book made her feel less alone in her own house. I don’t know what’s happening in her house. I hope it’s nothing. I wrote back anyway, something about how leaving is never as clean as it looks from outside, and that she isn’t behind if hers isn’t either.

Maybe that’s the rewrite. Not a scene where Seren leaves the Court. A scene where she notices, months later, standing somewhere ordinary, that she already has.

Should sleep. Rain still going. Four pages down, might be four pages closer to right ones.