Perhaps you’ve had the experience of arriving at the end of something you didn’t know was happening.
You come into the park just as the farmers’ market is being taken down.
“Gosh. I forgot they do these on Saturdays.”
The tables are mostly bare now. Empty crates are stacked beneath them. A lonely flower remains in a bucket. The sweet scent of a squashed peach rises from underfoot.
“Oh yes, we’ve been out here since eight.”
“The good stuff goes fast.”
There’s a feeling in the air. Not quite disappointment. Not quite nostalgia.
A lingering potential of what was. A beauty you can’t quite account for.
The sense that, only a few minutes ago, this place was full of something you can no longer quite see.
And the strange thing is, perhaps it would not have felt beautiful two hours earlier.
Two hours earlier, it would simply have been a farmers’ market.
The beauty is here, now, in the empty crates and folded tables. In the evidence of something just finished. In all that possibility still seeming to linger after the thing itself has gone.
Realizing something is nearly gone at the same moment you realize it mattered.
And it’s slipping further and further away.
If only you could press pause. Rewind a little. See it again exactly as it was.
Though perhaps what you want to hold onto is not the market at all.
Perhaps it’s this.
The moment of having just missed it.
To remain inside it for a few more seconds.
Often the thing that affects us most is almost impossible to explain afterward.
“The market was closing” sounds trivial. “A bag moved in the wind” sounds ridiculous.
The detail alone does not carry the experience.
Some moments are like inside jokes: intensely meaningful to the people who were there, and almost meaningless to anyone outside the context.
This is one of the difficult tasks of storytelling. A writer cannot simply report what happened and expect it to mean the same thing. The work is to restore enough of what surrounded it that the reader can arrive at the feeling on their own.
A story cannot preserve the original moment or let us truly step back into it. But it can hold something of its shape, its atmosphere, its consequence.
It can, perhaps, convey the mark left on the person who lived it.
She Dressed for No One began with exactly this problem: how to make a fleeting, emotional moment felt by someone who wasn’t there, without flattening it by overexplaining it.
Much of the writing has been an exercise in restraint. In deciding what must be shown, what can be left unsaid, and how much of a frame has to be built before a small thing can carry the weight it needs.
Perhaps that is what I am trying to do with this novel.
Not to hold onto a moment itself.
Only the feeling left behind.
In progress,
Madeline