Exile

It hurts to think about the writers back home that exiled me.

How there’s a gothic literature writer’s workshop I should be teaching at, but I’m not. How I should be reading at the next event, but I’m not. How, by all means, I should be still friendly with C.B., but again, I am not.

And how I can’t even really talk about it. How the book I’ve written has gone unpublished, forgotten, remaining hidden in a file deep, deep in the recesses of my computer. And how I can’t even talk about it.

Erstwhile, I believe that’s the word I mean to use. I don’t know if C.B. will even send me her book, I’ve become such a pariah to the community I was already dwelling on the outskirts of. And the one chance I sought to get into it, I was forced out in the most unimaginably cruel and traumatizing way. Betrayed in layers with no signs of remorse from the parties involved.

I’ve always been wary about attaching myself to people, especially large groups. I’m all too aware of things having expiration dates.

Even tonight, at the meeting, I’ll sit on the perimeter of the room, chewing on a stick of peppermint gum, attempting to be invisible.

Sometimes I miss the nights I spent with a bottle of Pinot Noir and a Nora Ephron movie, measuring my life through pours of red wine in my proverbial mushroom colony, punctuated by the occasional cigarette break, either on the porch or by my little spot near the riverbed.

Instead I spend my evenings with a chaste glass of tart cherry juice while the guinea pigs coo beside me in their kennel trying to ignore the sonorous hymn of my heart’s loneliness.