I'm taking a couple classes over at Loyola's writing center this fall - fiction and creative nonfiction - and figured I would save the shorter assignments here, as an alternative to flushing all that sweat down the drain (the shorter pieces only get the one readthrough). This one is from the nonfiction class. The teacher asked us to "introduce yourself in the third person."

☂

This is harder than he thought it would be.

Our protagonist sits by the window of an unfamiliar coffee shop, lemon bar at the ready, frowning at his keyboard. The quiet is disturbing. Usually he’s unable to think about anything other than himself, but he has now, by focusing very intently on that inner id and willing it to think of itself as independent somehow (in the third person, say) created a strange and rather hostile silence. The id is not cooperating. “This is just like you” our hero thinks, pouting a little and, as so often happens, quietly blaming the id for making his life so difficult.

He chews a little on his cheek and then takes a bite of lemon bar. No point in panicking. He’s inhabited this brain long enough to know that the way out is just a matter of triggers, cues, connections … some small spark to push fresh current through to the synaptic thistle and jump-start the beginning of a thought. He looks up from his laptop and tries squinting in to the middle distance in a way that he’s seen writers in movies squint. He purses his lips, he unpurses his lips. He checks his email. He looks up at the ceiling and breathes the way yogis breathe. He imagines inner clarity as a beam of light, and then thinks about beams of light in a more general way, like that one horrible summer when he was asked to operate the spotlight for a performance of “In To The Woods”. He considers introducing himself with that story, but decided he’d rather hold on to the respect of his classmates for another few sessions.

Just as our champion begins to contemplate pulling out of this ridiculous writing class altogether, he overhears the barista conversing with the next customer in line.

“Canada. It’ll be my first time out of the country.”

Well, he thinks, ok then. First time out of the country. That’ll work.

His eyes glaze, sparks catch, a tear in the gray widens and the light pouring through has the clear, candid chill of a day in late fall, just outside Boston. They’re in a taxi. He’s in the back seat, lying on his mother’s lap as she unscrews a bottle of eyedrops: solvent for the stickiness around his eyelids. Three drops and both eyes seal with pain; his fingers grasp the vinyl seam of the seat. His father’s up front, nodding as the driver drones on about how the Massachusetts State Lottery really works, how it’s just a matter of chaos theory and an algorithm that he’s worked out across the better part of a legal pad. They’re headed for the airport … the whole family’s going to the Caribbean. God, but what island … conjunctivitis … lottery …. they must have been going to Bonaire.

Except that wasn’t the first time. St. John was the first time. And that was earlier, when his sister wore saggy diapers and a frilly white bonnet and didn’t mind being buried up to her neck in sand; when geckos flickered up the dark green canvas of their tent; when he really considered, for the first time and deeply, the obvious, unspeakable evil of spiders.

Our narrator puts down his fork and makes a little sucking sound with his teeth. Lemon bars, almost without exception, are too sweet. This one is making his jaw ache.

Once the excitement over the first flash has died down and he’s spent a few minutes sorting out whether his misclassification of the second trip as the first trip matters (it doesn’t), or whether conjunctivitis is really the name of a disease (note to readers: there are some words that should remain un-Googled) he starts nodding. This is good. This is introduction-to-self type material. Not that he remembers those early trips well, but he’s fairly sure they set him up for a lifelong sense that he “travelled”; that travel could fill the particular space that ‘baseball’ or ‘math camp’ or ‘drums’ or ‘girls’ occupied for the other kids in his class. Why goodness, there’s a nice double-entendre there, kids in his class! Our main character nods a little and smiles at how totally on target he’s sounding right now. Why, it’s not every five year old that gets plucked from school to fly down to the Caribbean. Not that he knew it then, but that must have been part of the thrill - claiming for himself the advantages of being raised in a rather solidly middle-class family. And all this well before he’d learn to be embarrassed by class indicators or financial advantage or the presence of two parents who decided to stay married. All that came later … though not too much later.

A few thought-hops later, he stops to consider whether it would be better to start with his vaguely scarring interlude with the Boy Scouts of America. It certainly contains enough emotional trauma to make for a good introduction, but is that how these things should be measured? By the amount of residual scar tissue? He pauses. If the US bestseller list is any indication … but no, this is something his class will have to suffer through.

He takes his last bite of lemon bar with a wince.