The Prompt That Knew Too Much

Four minutes. That's how long I sat on the concrete step outside the classroom door before I actually went in. I counted because I had my watch on and I had nothing else to do except pretend I was reviewing my notebook, which I wasn't. I was watching other people walk through the door and doing that thing where you wait long enough that you're not the first one in but early enough that you still get a seat near the middle. It's a very specific calculation. I've perfected it over years of being a person who shows up early and then stalls anyway.

Creative Writing, first meeting. The class is smaller than I expected, maybe sixteen people, desks pulled into a loose shape that wasn't quite a circle and wasn't quite rows, which felt very intentional. The instructor handed out a single sheet at the start: the first prompt. And I want to be clear that what happened next is probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I'm going to say it anyway because that's apparently what this blog is for now. I read the prompt and I felt my stomach do something. Not nerves exactly. More like the specific feeling of being caught doing something you didn't know you were doing. The prompt was about a thing you keep returning to without meaning to. A thought, a place, a memory, something that keeps showing up in the margins of other things. And I sat there thinking: I have a draft saved on my computer with 'not for the blog' written at the top that is about exactly that. So. Great. Wonderful. Very normal start.

First prompt. First real moment of oh no.

I didn't write the real thing in class. I wrote something adjacent to it, true in the shape, not quite true in the center. Which is probably also something the instructor is going to talk about at some point and I'm going to have to sit with that too. I walked out after an hour and a half and my hand was cramped and my brain felt like I'd run it uphill. I'm going home and I'm going to go for a run and I'm going to decide later whether to be excited about this class or terrified of it. Right now both seem accurate.

Four minutes on the steps. Then I went in.