I sat at an isolated seat in Starbucks sipping at a blonde espresso. My computer sat before me, unopened, as I wondered how to start writing again. I glanced up, and a man in his thirties, dressed like a professor in a red sweater and white Oxford shirt and jeans, strode toward me. He didn’t look like any of my colleagues, although as time passed, it seemed I knew fewer and fewer of them. This man could have blended into a faculty reception without notice — of middling height and slight build, myopic brown eyes behind round steel-rimmed glasses —
I recognized him as he sat down, and understood why nobody else noticed him. The wide, vaguely almond-shaped eyes crinkled when he smiled at me —
“I figured I’d find you here.” Josh Young, chronicler of the sociomagical experiment known as Barn Swallows’ Dance — and writer of magical realism to the outside world — peered at me. “How’s progress on the book?”
“Books,” I corrected. “Two fiction and one not-so-fiction.” I studied my paper cup of espresso. “They’re not going well. I’m having trouble getting back to writing after my latest round of rejections, but you wouldn’t know that.”
The New York Times bestselling writer, who had won that distinction by the time he was thirty, suddenly seemed a little taller and more substantial. Of course — it was his connection to the earth-soul Gaia, to the sprinkling of trees that grew outside the library Starbucks. Nobody else, again, noticed. “Do you know why I’ve had the success in getting published?” I heard leaves whisper in his tenor voice.
“Because you’re really good at writing?” I met his gaze and his challenge.
“Because you wrote me that way. Because you wrote me as someone who studied writing fiction and wrote literary fiction and sent it to literary fiction agents. You wrote me as someone who not only had great talent, but great luck.”
“I wrote you to be a better writer than me?” I stammered.
“I can’t be better than the person who’s writing me — you see?” Josh chuckled, a dry sound that reminded me of leaves again. “I will say, though, that you wrote some lofty aspirations for me. If this wasn’t fantasy, I’d get rejected just as much as you do. The idea is to tell your truth, and tell it over and over until someone listens.” Josh walked his fingers toward my espresso, and I tapped his hand with my spoon in warning.
“But what if no one listens?” I threw the rest of the quad espresso down my throat as if it were a shot of whiskey and slammed the paper cup on the table.
Josh raised his eyebrows and peered over his glasses at me. “Then that’s their problem, because if you don’t listen and discern, you don’t learn, you fail to adapt, and you die. The first law of nature.”
I remembered when Josh was a college student, a little more frail with spiked hair and bright t-shirts. This man, thirteen years later, was no less beautiful, but he had calmed from the black-clad, precocious poetry slam artist to an equally precocious, wry and weighty scholar. He glanced down at the table, breaking eye contact. “Yes?” I asked.
“There’s a question I need to ask.” He paused for a noticeable increment of time. “Will I outlive –“
I knew the end of that question, and why Josh wanted to know. The love of his life, Jeanne Beaumont-Young, was thirty years older than him, which I guessed made her about 63. Of course, I had written about the end of this committed couple’s life together.
“Jeanne will live an extremely long life,” I ventured slowly, “and she will outlive you, but by only six months.” I withheld his cause of death, an undetected aneurysm, because it would make no difference — the fatal defect would be inoperable.
Josh nodded. “You could have taken the easy way out and had us both die at the same time, or you could have made me wait twenty years.” He stood, shook my hand, and wandered off, looking like any other professor who frequented the campus Starbucks.
Soon, to my surprise, he returned, eyes twinkling, with another stout blond espresso. “Writers need their coffee,” he grinned, and faded into the crowded coffeehouse.
Words Like Me 