Agnes Saves Madeleine from Despair

Yesterday I was feeling pretty low.

I was feeling ill; I was tired; my job was making me very angry; I had not written Story #1 the night before, and the deadline was looming; I was stuck in the middle of a paragraph that I could not finish; I could not look at Story #1 anymore, because the more I looked at it, the more confused I was getting; I had hoped to write at work, but that was, of course, impossible; the deadline was looming; I looked up an older story that I sort-of finished in August and thought that I would be forced to workshop that one in my class even though I did not want to; I did not like the older story, when I read it, as much as I thought I did; I started wondering, again, why I always find myself in this position, i.e., working on a story but never finishing it; the deadline was LOOMING; (ASIDE: My boss, as I write this entry, is in the middle of a fight with her 21-year-old son on the telephone. This happens ALL THE TIME. I have already spoken to her about it. She likes to call him Shithead.); I started wondering, again, if I would ever finish anything EVER; I was late to my class because of a work snafu—by work snafu I mean that my incompetent boss (see above) made careless mistakes AGAIN, which is not surprising since she does not know basic grammar and is unable to write a sentence (this is not a joke, unfortunately); when I got to class, they were discussing a Leonard Michaels story that I forgot to read; when we workshopped the stories, I was completely out of sync with my classmates and our leader, i.e., they simply loved a story that I could barely get through; this led me to think: these people are going to HATE my story—and it’s not even going to be finished.

I dragged myself home.

On the way home, I called Agnes. She was in a good mood and happy to hear from me. When I got to the subway entrance, I said I would call her if she wanted me to when I got home. She said, cheerfully, that she didn’t want me to.

(ASIDE #2: 98% of Madeleine’s and Agnes’s fights are about the phone. Agnes doesn’t like to talk on the phone EVER. She didn’t like to talk on the phone when they lived in the same apartment, and she doesn’t like to talk on the phone now that they spend most of their time apart. She doesn’t like to talk on the phone to ANYONE. Madeleine, on the other hand, likes to talk to Agnes on the phone 30 times a day. Sometimes Madeleine will call Agnes because she has something important to tell her (i.e., developments in the lawsuit, train schedules, etc.), and sometimes Madeleine will call Agnes for no reason at all (i.e., she is bored, she wants to hear Agnes’s voice, something happened and she wants to share it with Agnes), and sometimes Madeleine will call Agnes to complain about something or even to take out her frustrations on Agnes. Sorry, Agnes! Madeleine understands why Agnes doesn’t like to talk to other people on the phone—afterall, Madeleine only enjoys talking to one other person on the phone, i.e., our Dear Reader—but why Agnes doesn’t like to talk to Madeleine on the phone—that is much harder for Madeleine to understand, though she is trying. Sometimes Agnes will be doing something, focusing on work or some project, and she will simply forget to call Madeleine. Madeleine admires these feats of concentration; she wishes she could stay focused on projects the way that Agnes does, but Madeleine simply doesn’t understand how Agnes could forget to call her, especially only once a day—especially since Madeleine feels like she thinks about Agnes all the time—and sometimes Madeleine takes this personally, which is when Madeleine and Agnes fight.)

I had to wait a long time for the subway. This gave me more time to think bad thoughts about myself—and also to wonder why Agnes didn’t want me to call her. (See above.) I didn’t get too upset with Agnes this time, though, because I was trying to focus all of my anger on myself.

When I got home, I told myself not to call Agnes, and then I called Agnes. She answered! I told her I was feeling low, that I felt lost, that I simply couldn’t get through the new dreaded paragraph. She asked me what I meant by that. I said that I had sentences, I had details, I knew what was supposed to happen, but I couldn’t get all that information into the correct order, i.e., an order that made sense to me, and onto the page. She said, talk me through it. I said, no. She said, maybe if you talk through it, it will be clearer in your own head. I said, no. She said, try it. I talked it through with Agnes, several times, and Agnes said, see, it’s not so bad. You can do it! You can do it, Madeleine, she said, I know you can.

And I believed her. And I STILL believe her this afternoon, even though I am at work and I am still in the middle of the dreaded paragraph.

So thank you, Agnes. You should use your phone skills more often.