On Writing

TW: Sexual Violence

The cafe reminds me of a coworking space, but with a cruller or a croissant for the entrance fee rather than some monthly payment. It would have been perfect for certain days when I needed to do work—business work: logistics, scheduling, emails, and so on—but it is not suitable for curling up with a good book. Or for writing. Not least because all the seats are bar chairs with low, hard backs, designed for an elevation of the head to some 13-14 inches above the countertops. Not hunched. It is also not a place suitable for writing because I am always terrified about the people near me reading what I have written. Crazed, blackened thoughts—often short thoughts—which look too prominent on a single white page. Too glaring. 

For example, today I write:

After I was assaulted sophomore year, I started seeing the body of my perpetrator hanging from trees everywhere. I'd walk down under the luscious foliage of College Walk and see bodies cropping up and swinging ahead from each tree, like I was a magical lamplighter illuminating the walkway, decorating the trees one by one with backlit bodies instead of lightbulbs. Until, finally, I was shuffling along one of those tunnels formed by mirrors on each side—endless, parallel rows of bodies. A body there on the left, a body there on the right, swinging in sync, and me in the middle, walking. Camera behind. 

In the earlier days—which were of friendship—with my perpetrator, we had shared small and big things with each other. The inklings of truth behind joking statements such as, "Oh my God, I’m going to kill myself." Statements partly real and partly due to the budding desire to fall in line and in fashion with wonderful, throbbing teenage melancholy. I do not know how much of my truth was the truth, and how much of his was. But after the assault, I prayed that his was real. That he was indeed hunted by something—not beautiful and languishing like in The Virgin Suicides, but more repulsive and brutish—and that it would get him. I hoped he would be as alone then as he had now made me, that this loneliness would be part of the thing that gets him. But I knew that he was likely not alone, and as such would not be hunted down.

In the cafe, I try to angle my body around the notebook like a praying mantis. You can see how these words could be alarming, should you happen to glance them upon my page. These are thoughts so ugly that I hadn't wanted to include them among my other writings, but to isolate them, to leave them alone, with a scribbled line before and after. A section confined to my college life and campus years ago. 

In fact, up until now, I had not thought of my trauma as location based. I hadn’t liked to think of it as trauma at all. I hadn't wanted to think that the event had affected me in any way that I could not control with the right mindset. I had even started to like my personal puppet show on the way to class. With the right soundtrack, it made the walk to and from much more interesting. It was not until I was walking in between the subway pillars earlier today and caught a glimpse of some bodies swinging—no longer a tunnel of light, but more like ghosts in the forest—that I realized how long it had been since I had thought about him and the joy of another person's potential suicide. 

Though I am still waiting for it. 

Surely. 

Before you chastise me for thinking that strangers care about what I am writing in a coworking cafe, I know it is possible for I was always doing it. Glancing at another person's screen or notebook, checking or judging what they were reading or writing. We are all sitting so close together here that it is almost unavoidable. I cannot turn my head without being greeted by another person's email or the next event in their calendar. One man is making a presentation set to the format of a cell phone screen, and I find that quite interesting. He leaves and the girl who replaces him begins to fill out a spreadsheet, and that interests me less. 

I move to a different cafe for writing. This one is much more suitable. It has low lights, brown wood, and some cafe benches with shoulder-height backs and thin cushions. So I could lean back and read a book if needed, in between the writing. Some people are sitting by themselves, reading or writing or checking their phones. The many other pairs or groups in the cafe are all engrossed in conversations, and though the place is small and semi-crowded, it has much more distance between the tables than the countertops at a coworking cafe. Even my arrogance or paranoia cannot convince me that anyone here would be likely to read or glance at what is in my notebook. 

My phone rings. It is a message from a dating app. Under the prompt for my profile, "What do you hope to accomplish in the new year?" I had answered, "Write more." He asks what I like to write about. I do not tell the truth. 

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Jessica Bao is a writer based in New York City. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022 with a BA in English, where she received the Phi Kappa Sigma Fiction Prize, the Nancy Rafetto Leach Sweeten Essay Prize, and the Lilian and Benjamin Levy Award for Reviewing. She is an Essay Reader at Write or Die Magazine, and her work has been published in The F-Word, 34th Street Magazine, and various anthologies. She is from Shanghai, China and Rochester, Michigan. She has a cat who loves to sit on paper and books.

@jessica_bao13