Thoroughly Enjoy Reading It
by Devarya Singhania, Staff Writer
It’s cruel. To sit in the dimness of the residence lights as another email reads: “We regret to inform you that we will not be moving ahead with your submission, although we thoroughly enjoyed reading it and look forward to future submissions from you” – the aggressive strums of Linkin Park, AC/DC or Guns N’ Roses have time to macerate your ears today. It’s an unfathomable attack assimilating deliriously underneath the tickling hairs of your lobe, while a deft gust swerves to mince the temporary glistening tear in your irises.
This isn’t your first rejection but the ache wounds you to still aghast. There’s no advice which makes sense for the next hour, and no one knows of the rejection but the numbness in your mind. It’s hard to accept the “you write well” when every droplet from the black ink of your pen or the precision of the characters typed on your documents invite the mirrored regret from every reader, who say they enjoyed your work.
It’s hard not to chuckle knowing that you’re burdening major publications with the idea of an exemplary guilt, only because you felt your work was worth a page of their print. Well, you’ve rejected a few works before too; mischievously hypocritical I see.
The same email which inflicts the scar on your skin was typed through your laptop a few months ago. You tell yourself this as you sip the incarcerating caffeine in the lukewarm energy drink beside you, bringing you calm. It’s a calm out of macerating fatigue from the lost hours of sleep. This is not a search for anyone’s particular sympathy: for you don’t know if they’ll enjoy hearing your stories enough to work with you again.
Noises from the snooker game behind you invite glances away from the disdainful email in an abhorrent font. It’s a partial glance but even your peripheral view loyally shuns away any glimpses of the laptop. Lasting for a few minutes still, the game gets monotonous, and you’ve not trained your neck to be as flexible. Eyes on the prize again.
Peculiar as it may be, this one sentence from the email possesses a grasp beyond comprehension over your work; it puppets your mind to see the illusionary corruption within even one stanza from the poem you adored a week ago.
the fallen breeze, deflected by delicate,
triangular maples
singularly floating like the last snow of february
in this sorrowful sky.
Every excerpt from the poem reminds you of the bitterness in your writing. You can’t even blame the publication, for your writing isn’t the best. Well, it was before you read that email, now you know. Even so the alliteration you’d sketched etched authenticity to the moment you’d experienced it but now the rhythms taste sorrowful on your tongue.
It’s not the first poem you wrote, and you wrote a few after. But it’s the one which made someone regret informing you something. That’s power. The guilt-ridden nineteen year old’s poem which evokes regret; how marvellous.
You stitch these lies with an intricacy beyond the imagery illustrated in your poems to compose yourself and allow grasping the table on which you place your laptop and devour caffeine. You narrate these lies to neglect the brooding insomnia which captures you in the hours of the sleeping stars at night. You chuckle, and the nineteenth nod of your head helps you fix the dangling glasses on your nose bridge.
Reverberating beside you as you thump the table in the frustrations accompanied by your forty-seven playlists, the fizz in your energy drink settles down. There’s no tickle on your nose as you sip it.
With your palms interlocked, as the faint cold in the residence around you pricks the hairs erect on your knuckles, while they dismantle the position of the glasses in your nose bridge as you sigh in a deafening exasperation, you think of the lie you’ll tell the insomnia tonight.
You reminisce with the rejection, and it informs you of the regret.
