Tales of Expulsion

How inspiration can stay with you for YEARS!

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

—December 31, 2011—

“Dying. Dying. Dying,” Esth says. She pins a firm look at me through her rearview mirror to where I’m sitting in the backseat. “It is my poem. You can’t steal it.”

We’re sitting in her sky-blue jeep outside of Cuisine of India waiting for our parents to bring food out. I just finished the first semester of my creative writing degree, and Esth is almost officially a nurse. The previous year, I escaped often from my cubicle to call her. Between her all-day clinicals and study hours, she’d listen to me talk about how I’d literally die if I didn’t try to become a writer. Now I’m living at home to keep a handle on expenses, and Esth is working at a hospital four times a month to finish her degree. She likes to brag that she is the best bed-pan changer on her floor and cheekily opine that her future life of administering medications will be way more consequential than anything I’ll probably ever do. But really Esth has always wished to be more creative, and this goes all the way back to when I drew a family of rabbits with markers. She showed it to everyone because she loved it so much while I was just annoyed. I didn’t want her touching my things.

Tonight, we’re both heading out to Los Angeles to celebrate the New Year with our respective groups of friends, but she’s stopped by because she didn’t eat breakfast.

“You don’t want to be alone with me in the wilderness,” she says, “I’d eat you.” She tosses this thought backwards just as our mother emerges from the pink-curtained restaurant.

Later, we’ll all sit around our patio amidst empty plates smeared in brown, yellow and green curries with stray basmati rice stuck to their rims. Esth will lean back in her chair and pat her engorged stomach. Then she blows her nose. She also has a bad head cold.

“I must not have any brains left,” she says. Then admits to going through a box of Kleenex a day.

She crumples up her tissue in her fist and gives me another look.

“You should write a poem about mucus,” she says. And although she doesn’t know it, I accept her challenge immediately.

by Sarah Dzida

Author’s Note: I’ve been working on this for almost a decade. I actually finally have the full draft. Now it’s just time to polish. Sometimes the journey is what matters more than the output in creativity.