by Julian Gallo
She has the right hairstyle, the right eyeglasses, and the right clothes—everything carefully crafted to solidify her place in the bohemian world in which she desperately wants to belong.
She holds court at the table at the back of the café, surrounded by mostly male admirers, all of whom climb over one another to get her attention. The only other woman in the group, also good looking and bookish, fits in with the whole bohemian thing but doesn’t attract as much attention. She doesn’t work it as much as Meredith does. She, too, is enamored of the beautiful poet, wants to be more like her, but deep down she fears she never will be. She has to settle for second best. The other girl.
Every week, Meredith reads her poetry at the open-mic presentations, and every week she’s applauded and fawned over and treated like a queen. Free coffees and a constant stream of accolades can often go to one’s head, and Meredith believes she is more talented than she actually is. The other girl doesn’t think much of her poetry, is often silently critical, and will always be silently critical. Meredith can open doors for her.
The boys who watch Meredith read her poetry often only half listen, for they are too focused on her, and no matter what she reads, they will applaud her, shower her with compliments, never uttering a critical word. Not a single one of them wants to blow their chance, if they even have any to begin with, that is.
By the end of the night, Meredith leaves her cadre of admirers and returns home alone to her Brooklyn apartment. Sometimes she writes, sometimes she reads, and sometimes she checks her social-media pages for comments on her poetry. There, too, most of her followers are men, and not all of them are young. Many of them are old enough to be her father, and they too often shower her with praise, leaving comments on her work, which often reeks of insincerity and plays the game, for she knows how the game works, carefully curating which photos to post, those she knows will give her poems the most attention.
Then she goes to bed, again alone, watches a little television, maybe has another cursory scroll through her Facebook page on her cellphone, then tries to go to sleep.
As she drifts between the waking and dream worlds, her thoughts run away with her. Somewhere deep down she knows she’s a fraud, that she plays the game because she feels this is what she has to do. How many of those men who shower her with attention and praise are genuinely interested in what she writes, and how many of them are seeking something else? It makes it hard to trust people. And the women? Too competitive, catty, two-faced, and consumed with envy. Whom can she trust?
The next morning, she showers and dresses alone, then heads off to work alone. No one knows she’s a poet. No one cares, and she yearns for those Wednesday nights at the café where she will be greeted like a queen, be offered free coffee by a number of young men, then read her poetry to an adoring audience who will tell her how wonderfully she writes and how insightful her work is. Then the night will end and again she will return home, again alone, and go through her usual routine, then lie in bed wondering how much of it is sincere, and the cycle will continue.
Her insufferable loneliness is expressed in her poetry, but no one is listening. They hear the words, but they don’t know what is actually going on inside her, and all the praise in the world will do nothing to fill that void. Every move she makes is carefully choreographed in order to conceal the void, the one she so desperately wants someone to acknowledge.
The following week she reads her poems to the adoring crowd, only this time she pays a little more attention to the male gaze, and she sees something else in their eyes. What she once saw as adoration is now the ravenous gaze of a pack of coyotes before a hunk of raw meat. She suddenly feels hollow, ashamed of herself, like a fraud. She has to struggle to get through her performance, something she never had to ever do. It’s difficult to read her words, hearing them disappear into the void. For the first time in her life, she realizes her words are not important.
Perhaps they never were.
New York City, May 2022