She Gets on the Plane
On the kind of reader I imagine, and why
Writers are supposed to have an ideal reader - someone they imagine on the other side of the page. I don’t think about mine in terms of stats or market fit. I think about her as a person. She’s not real, but she could be. She might even be me, a few years ago. Or maybe she’s someone I made up so I wouldn’t feel so alone when I write. I don’t know exactly who she is, but I know how she feels. She’s tired, thoughtful, and holding on to more than she lets on. She picks up stories hoping they’ll help her understand something she hasn’t figured out yet.
She has a steady job. The kind people say you should be grateful for. And she is, mostly. It’s a cushy job – and that’s the kindest thing you can say about it. She shows up every day, does what’s asked. But she shows up tired. She lives tired. She doodles flowers and stars in the margins of her work notebook during meetings. Steve, from accounting, might make a snide remark about it, but she doesn’t mind. Her coworkers like her, but they don’t really know her. Even if she is forthcoming about the details of her life, she has a way of saying things candidly and keeping the good stuff hidden. She drinks cold coffee, forgets lunch breaks, and thinks about quitting at least once a week. If she could quit, she’d move to a plot of land on the countryside, and sustain herself through homesteading. She’d love to raise a few chickens or goats, but without a windfall of money and a much bigger backyard, that is not likely in her future. She tells herself this is just a phase, that she’ll get through it. But something in her knows – she’s not meant to live this way forever.
She feels everything more than she wants to – and reacts bigger than she means to. She has no shame about crying over sappy commercials. She rereads the same paragraph five times if it hits her the right way - don’t the good ones always hit hard enough to deserve an encore? For her, good stories, her favourites, are the ones that leave a bruise. Not necessarily sad, but honest. She escapes into books that are about people: the raw, messy, too-much kind. She dabbles in fantasy, myth, and folklore. But only because those carry truth in disguise. She knows that real monsters don’t always have fangs. But there’s nothing wrong with reading about someone fucking them. Her bookshelf is full, her books all annotated. Full of underlined lines that make her heart squeeze or her head explode. And so often they do, evoking giant feelings that can’t possibly be contained within one squishy human. Somedays, her feelings weigh her down so much that she can’t do anything except sit with them. She’s not broken, not exactly. But she is full. She contains multitudes.
She’s the kind of woman that, one afternoon, without drama or warning, books a flight. Not because she’s having some sort of breakdown. She just knows she can’t stay where she is anymore. She can’t sit in her feelings this time. No one sees it coming. She picks a destination haphazardly – like throwing a dart at a map and accepting wherever it lands. It’s not about where she’s going. Its about going somewhere. She packs light – appropriate clothes for the climate, a toothbrush, enough fresh underwear to last a month. And of course, she brings a book. But one she’s already read, already dissected to pieces – the one with underlines and penciled-in notes in the margins. On the plane, she gets a window seat. She paid for it. She’s going to get some perspective, damnit. She stares out that window and wonders if she’s making a mistake. She hopes she is. At least a mistake would do something. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s left something behind. Maybe that something is a part of her, or a version of herself. She forgot deodorant.
I think about her every time I write, about her being the one on the other side of the page, scribbling flowers and stars around my work. I write for her, and imagine her getting excited when my book comes out. I don’t write for the version of her that is thriving – I write for the version that is searching. My stories aren’t meant to fix her. In fact, some of them are meant to piss her off, make her cry. I don’t give her happy endings, I give her recognition. She’s the one I picture reading my book on that plane. Or in bed at 3:0am. Or in a parking lot before she walks back into the life she’s outgrown.
Maybe she never came back. Maybe she didn’t need to. She got on that plane, and she changed. That’s what matters. Maybe she is still in motion, figuring it out. That’s ok. No matter what, she’ll always be reading. Maybe you see her. Maybe you are her. My writing is for people like her. People like you.
She gets on the plane. You pick up the story. Either way, something begins.