Medium

Margaret McNamara || Fall 2020

I think the typewriter will fix my problems.

I think the typewriter will translate my thoughts onto the page for me and I think the typewriter will catapult me into being who I want and making what I want and if I can just get the typewriter fixed but I don’t get the typewriter fixed and that’s what’s keeping me from everything that I want.

Where do I go from here. I am immobilized by everything I want to be. I think and think and think and there’s no doing in my thinking so I just think. I think Nora Ephron and Bill Cunningham and Sophia Roe and how no one knows me. No one knows me because I know no one. I think Nicole Wilkins and how she said if you want to be good at something there’s going to be an imbalance somewhere but there’s too much I want to be good at. So I just do nothing instead and everything is still imbalanced.

All I want is to talk to people but I’m so afraid.

All I want is to make things but I’m so afraid.

All I want is to know and be known but I just sit and think about the typewriter instead and I’ve been thinking about it since I was a child.

Dad’s meeting in the office is too loud so let’s blame it on that let’s blame it on the typewriter because it’s broken and it won’t work and if it were fixed then everything would be ok.

I search for the old I search for the antique I’m so impatient yet all I want is a slow burn. Instant gratification. Lack thereof. I want a physical copy. I want I want I want. The typewriter is broken.

But is it broken or just neglected? There’s no consistency.

I write things so steeped in angst that I feel like a fraud.

I write the things that will never happen to me. I write the things that made me hate my life when I read them years ago. But really I don’t write them I just think about writing them but if the typewriter was fixed they would already be written.

Sometimes I feel like I’m going to burst.

The typewriter just sits in my closet it just languishes there on the shelf collecting dust inside the case with no hinges. The case is broken the typewriter is broken.

If I can just get it fixed. If I can just get the typewriter fixed.