Rejection: What This Title Would Experience If I Could Think Of Something Better

It’s windy outside, and it’s sending my cranes dancing.  I have two paper cranes, floating a piece of string tacked into the ceiling in front of the window.  This week  I thought, I think it’s time for them to have a baby.

I started this thing freshman year, when I got my first rejection letter.  We had to submit soemthing for publicaiton, so I sent a very short little essay to a magazine for middle grade readers.  It was a little story from when I was in first grade and I was the only one in my whole calss who didn’t believe leprechauns were real.  Now that I think of it it was I got a letter back weeks later, a little note printed on a quarter sheet of paper, saying thanks but no thanks.  I handled it with what grace I could muster.   I talked to my friend Jen Ricks, and she mentioned all these wacky things she heard famous authors did with rejeciton letters.  Someone apparently squewers them on a lance.  That sounded cool.  I decided to make them into origami cranes. 

I went through an origami phase somewhen in childhood.  Aunt Diana gave me an origami set for my birthday one year—a little box with some packets of pretyt paper and a booklet of patterns.  I did them all over and over and over all summer long, and even into the school year a bit—it was the summer before sixth grade, because I remember being in my sixth grade core classroom and sliding a post it note out of my pocket to fold into an angel fish.  I brough many little slips of paper, not sure how I would be able to handle so many hours without paper in my hands.  Eventually it dropped off, until it was somehting I only did to while away the hours of sacrament meeting, until even that dwindled.  My letter from Cicada was the first crane I’d made in a long long time.  I strung it on a length of red thread with some sequins, and tacked it to the ceiling.  I dubbed it the Crane of Peace Amidst Adversity.  I used to be a lot wordier, in some ways.  Last year my crane made a friend, when the English Reading Series asked for submisisons of essays or stories or poems about love for a special Valentine’s Day event.  I wrote something pathetic and was rewarded with a very kindly worded email saying thanks but no thanks.  Which really was for the best, because it was not something that could have been comortably read aloud to a room full of people.  And now The Crane has a friend, and they have become The Cranes, and they sway gently in the breeze that comes in through the open window, and opens my room into the rain storm outside. 

 

This week I decided to nurture my crane family.  Several of my friends were writing pieces for yet another English Reading Series contest, this one in honor of the autumn season.  I figured, here’s another chance;  I’ll write something quick and dirty, submit it, and either way I’m happy:  either I get miraculously accepted or I get another crane.   So I sat down, wrote some stuff.  It was fun.  It was mindless.   I just sat and let words happen and that was that.  As I went to email the final product to the contest manager I discovered that essays and short stories were supposed to be around eight pages long.  Hmm; mine was maybe one and a half.   So, I decided that I had written a poem.  If I were actually trying to win I would have felt awful, hitting the return key at every comma and period.  Instead, I felt funny and exhilerated and free.

But.  It turns out it’s kind of a tricky thing, looking for rejeciton,  because it should lead to ultimate freedom, but I think there’s a limit to my (/humanity’s?) ability to fool myself (ourselves?).  I can say that I want to be rejected, and I can decide to not care, and that is liberating.   But the minute  I send my ‘poem’ off into the ether, it comes back to real motivations.  Sure, I can say haha I just want more little cranes, woohoo.  But really?  I’m not so sure.  No matter how hard I try, I cannot truly be that Zen.  Some (small?) part of me still thinks, oh man, they will see how free and liberated and fun the writer was, and they will say, Aha, this is brilliant!  Being silly and frivolous will translate into being witty and taking risks.  A genius I never knew I possessed will be discovered.

I forget that that wasn’t supposed to be the point.  The point was to lose, to prove that I like losing and losing is okay, and to show myself that I am okay with it, that I am stronger than whatever contest or panel of judges I am faced with.  I am okay with myself, that is the point; and I am so okay with myself that I can represent myself to contest people as a complete fool, and still be okay.

I’m at my computer going through folder after folder of silly rants and blurbs in my “desktop writing” file, trying to find anything that I can use for essay fodder.  I came across my little Autumn Poem joke, and I open it up to show my roommate.  I tell her the joke, then leave the room to go fill my cup with Sprite.  I come back in, she looks up, and says, “You’re right, this is really bad.”  I just look at her. 

“I wish this were water in my mouth,” I say.  “I want to spit it at you.”

Then she felt bad, like she had hurt my feelings.  The thing is, I’m still not sure if she did.  I mean, I knew it was terrible.  I knew that it was a random paragraph of babbling with a jagged right margin.  The whole point was for it to be terrible.  And yet my reaction was still a huh, a tightening of the stomach, and urge to spit in her face.  Where did that come from, I wonder.  Later, after more words and feelings and awkward stumbling we draw eachother mustaches with eyeliner.  She looks at hers in the mirror and laughs just a little at the unevenness of what I’ve done to her upper lip.  I wrinkle my brow, half in jest.  Bu thalf?  I don’t know.  Her face crumples.

 “I reject you in the most subtle ways,” she says. 

And I think, Wait. Am I really this fragile?

And I don’t know that answer. I don’t know how much of me is just a lot of talk that I talk with myself, talk that says that I don’t have anything to prove, that I do what I want and that is all.