False Starts Chelsea M. Carney
In 2020, the amount of false starts I’ve encountered have been dizzying. Blame it on this Covid, this quarantine, this president, this year, but it’s like my brain is fragmented and I only have access to one compartment at a time. Whether it’s getting distracted by my phone three minutes into a Netflix movie, or anxiously re-reading the same work project over and over again, I can’t seem to finish an entire thought. As a writer, whole essays are taking up space in my head, but all I ever get out on paper is a single sentence, one after another, like a choose your own adventure to the threads in my brain. I used to be fuller, more articulate. Now I’m looking at a blinking mouse on a blank page, desperately trying to manifest an intelligible paragraph. It makes me feel less than, like I’ve been cut in half. That’s the thing about writing in quarantine. Living in quarantine. I’ve searched my room, my thoughts, my hard drives and churned up nothing but wasted one liners and badly-written paragraphs. My memories are bleak, too, shadowy. They bleed into my brain and mix with rage, with fear, with disgust, muddling together into a weird purplish blue that makes my temples hurt. Once sniffing out promotions and publishing deals, new restaurants in
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the Village and shows at Union Hall, I’m now four inches tall, centering myself in a fourteen-inch screen, waiting to click a button that says, “Hey Chelsea, you exist now.” Taking inventory of all those single static sentences, each a start to an essay I’d hoped to write this year, I look for a thread. A way to come back to myself. To remember what it’s like to be bright without an on switch. ~ False Start Number One: At nine years old, I became obsessed with Mae West. I remember sitting in an office at Saint Joseph’s hospital waiting for my mother to finish up work. Her being a nurse, I knew it would take a while, so using one of those boxy computers from the ‘90s to research a homework assignment, I’d clicked on a quote: “When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.” Referencing the black and white photo attributed to the page, I noticed a buxom woman with pencil thin eyebrows wearing a satin dress, dripping with furs and pearls. Instantly mesmerized, it wasn’t her celebrity I was enamored with; it was her lack of boundaries. Something so intoxicating about being exact-