Write Here, Write Now.
I think about Mallory every day, and I can’t express the pain I feel when I simply miss her with every blood cell in my body.
Today, it dawned on me, though. Mallory was such an advocate for a lot of things in my life, some good, some bad. I smoked weed for the first time with Mallory. She asked me to come along with her friends one night and said, “If Allie refuses to smoke, everyone just blow it in her face.”
Mallory encouraged me to lose my virginity. She bought me a box of condoms for my birthday, decorated with a pink ribbon. One time, she came home when Alex and I were hanging out in the room and she said, “So, did you guys have sex yet?” A very awkward “no” was the answer.
But if Mallory did anything, she encouraged me to be who I was. I wasn’t always nice, I wasn’t always reliable, or clean (in fact, I was hardly ever clean), I slept a lot, probably complained more than anyone, and yet she still loved me. I can’t help but remember one time she came home during NaNoWriMo and I was in the middle of a word war. She was distracting me by telling me all sorts of stuff about her day, and I said, “Hey, I’m doing a word war right now, can I talk to you in 7 minutes or so?” and she was like “yeah sure!”
After I was done, she sat down in her chair across from me in our little dorm room and told me that I was going to be successful one day. I think I remember my face getting hot. I can’t remember the exact words she told me, but I remember her telling me that she had never met anyone as passionate about writing as me. She said that she knew a lot of potential authors but that she had never met one who loved the art as much as I did, and because of that, she knew that I would go far with writing.
Tonight, I discovered the magnitude of what she was talking about.
Mallory might be disappointed in me with how I have treated my words recently. This past NaNoWriMo, I had no motivation at all, and finished with an end product that is absolutely painful to think about.
I thought, I’ll switch to poetry.
Poetry too lost its fun, its meaning. Poetry class became a feat, an annoyance. It no longer felt like art and I were one with another; it felt like art was something I once liked in the past, like a pesky ex-boyfriend.
Mallory passed away on February 26, and that beautiful girl fought that cancer with all that she had. She held it off for five years, and was such an inspiration to me and to many others. I feel the importance of writing again, having forgot the day I put off my conversation with a great girl to write. I had forgotten her words.
Now, I am really going to push on. I am going to write, and I’m not going to stop until someone publishes me. And once I publish a novel, despite all the other people who deserve a dedication, Mallory deserves it the most.
For Mallory, my dear friend who taught me who I am.
