Who Is the Reader

There is a question written in blue pen in the margin of my returned essay. Not a correction, the instructor didn't mark anything wrong. Just a question, four words, with no question mark, which somehow makes it heavier: this already has a reader in mind, who.

I've been looking at it for three days. I taped the page to the wall above my desk, which is the kind of thing you do when something won't stop bothering you and you need it in your sightline so you can argue with it. I wrote the essay out of the draft I've been keeping off the blog, the one I keep opening to add one line and closing twenty minutes later having rewritten half of it. I didn't think I was writing toward anyone. I thought I was writing away from something, the version of this blog that felt like it had gotten too polished, too careful, too much like a performance of a person instead of an actual one. But apparently someone could tell.

Tonight I sat down to write a response. Not to the instructor, they've already handed the essays back and moved on, but to the question itself. I wrote it here, in the draft window, which is technically The Hartwells, which is technically a lifestyle blog I started when I was nineteen, which is not the obvious place to answer a question from a creative writing class. And about halfway through I realized what I was doing. I was writing the post I've been saving as a draft called 'not for the blog' since September. I was writing the thing I couldn't publish because I didn't know who it was for yet.

the notebook was supposed to be for class. it became something else.

Here is what I figured out, in three hundred words in a draft window at eleven o'clock the night after Thanksgiving: the reader is whoever was in the Creative Writing class when my instructor handed back the essays and one person said that's exactly how it felt. The reader is that person, whoever they are anywhere, the one who reads something and feels recognized rather than just informed. I don't know if that's a lifestyle blog or a personal essay column or just the place where I write things down. But I know the shape of it now. And I know I was always writing toward it, I just kept filing it under 'not for the blog' because I hadn't given myself permission yet.

sat back and read the whole thing. didn't delete it.

I'm giving myself permission now. That's the whole post. That's the mission statement I apparently needed a stranger's margin note to find.