Creep
There is just enough snow on the smaller neighborhood roads that my studded tires don’t make a noise. I turn down the music to roll silently, holding my body still and open, like an eye. I always catch myself staring. This is one of the few silences in my life. I glide, silently, past the quiet rows of buildings. I peer into homes—houses, apartments, condos—and they, like they knew I was coming, are always lit up from the inside, curtains thrown open. Some are polished to a gleam, showroom bright, silver microwaves and fingerprint-free appliances and chic overhead lights; some cluttered, lived in, cozy, awash in stained-glass lamplight. Never anyone in them.
The absence of the narrator in these settings, I like to fantasize, is glaring. I’ve just left a writing workshop, and the absence of the narrator is on my mind. A lack of narrative presence comes up often when my pieces are being workshopped. The stakes of this piece you’re writing are not high enough, I hear over and over again. We don’t know who the narrator is. We can’t connect with them. It’s true. I know.
All these homes, always empty. My tires creep. The snow creaks. I wonder: did the owners of these homes not have mothers? (Mothers who demanded they draw the curtains every evening, who chided them over the wasted electricity, who asked, “Why keep the lights on when you’re sleeping—aren’t you worried about people looking in, watching you? They’ll see that kids live here!” The rest, an effective implication.)
We’re dropped into this complex, or difficult—the exact words vary depending on the specific nature of the text’s inscrutability—emotional landscape with no sense of who the narrator is or why we should read what they have to say. Who is this person, and why should we trust them?
The townhouse to my left has huge windows, an extraordinarily chic asymmetrical reclaimed-metal lighting fixture that takes dramatic center stage in a generically upscale kitchen. I wonder if the fixture is from a local place—maybe the lighting store with a marquee board out front that displays a different Republican joke every time I drive by. I wonder what this selection says about the owners, their politics: did they choose the store for the joke? Did they overlook the jokes for this must-have chandelier? I look for art to speculate one way or another, but there are only bare walls painted a burnt orange-reddish color, broken up by a stainless-steel refrigerator.
I slide by.
Piece after piece I submit and hear the same feedback. This is impersonal. I don’t feel connected to the narrator, so I’m not invested. Make us care.
We often aren’t permitted to respond to comments in workshop, but even when we are, I elect not to. Though there are obviously exceptions to this rule and circumstances in which rebuttal is necessary, I generally find the practice of countering workshop critique to be unhelpful at best and distasteful at worst.
So, I make note of the feedback I receive, type it out over and over again into different documents. Make us care. Make us care. Raise the stakes. I don’t feel upset receiving this critique so much as confused, I think, and a little bit desperate.
If I ever felt motivated to rebut, what I might say is that maybe I don’t know how to raise the stakes. Maybe I am not brave enough. Marking out the boundary of the self feels like placing stakes in the sand at the tideline to mark where the ocean is. And until I figure out the stakes, how can I, in good conscience, beg—out loud—to be known, to be cared for?
A me-child wants to be heard, screams and rages and cries. The me-teenager has hands balled up in fists and insists through gritted teeth that no one cares about me but me. Me-now sitting at a bright-lit coffee shop in the winter afternoon dark believes that writing is the ultimate demonstration of the belief that one’s own thoughts and ideas have worth, and wonders, on this basis, if I should call myself a writer at all. I am trying to make both you and me understand at the very same time. I am worried I am not doing a good enough job.
Who the hell would watch me through the windows? I used to wonder to myself after being chastised by my mom, begrudgingly drawing the curtains in my room. Who the hell has the time or the energy for that?
The snow under my tires creaks.
Another house has so much art on the walls I can’t quite make the individual pieces out, except for a single metal star with holes punched out all over it—the kind, I think, that normally serves as yard decor. The next house with wide, angled, floor-to-ceiling windows has a Christmas tree suspended upside down from the ceiling to better shine out over their second-story deck, though the effect is a little bit eerie.
Raise the stakes. Make us care. I take the notes on my writing because, in some ways, the feedback is right. I take the notes knowing that there are things I can’t fix yet because there are things I haven’t grown into being able to think yet. There are some things I don’t know or maybe cannot yet admit, or don’t have the voice or the words to say. In writing, I am presenting what I have. And sometimes, I don’t have it.
Sometimes, ideas melt right from my hands like fistfuls of snow. Sometimes, I accidentally punch right through the delicate floss of an idea with a heavy fist, and I must pray for a spider in the coming nights to remake it.
The next house has holiday lights like I’d only ever seen at my childhood home, plastic chrysanthemums made of clear cups threaded with string lights. We got them from my Illinois grandma who died when I was in second grade. I thought my dad made them, but I guess I never thought to ask.
I didn’t know anyone else had them, and I’m nauseous with nostalgia seeing them strung on a stranger’s front porch. They have no idea that we hung one in the kitchen during the holidays, that it stayed on all night as an exception to our normally frugal electric policy. They don’t know how, when I was young and up later than everyone else, I used to stare.
I would gather nests of prickly dark spots in my eyes from looking right at the lights, willing myself to remember remember remember so I might make sense of this exact feeling when I was older: my bare feet on the hardwood floor, the gauzy curtains between me and the darkened windows and the reflection of a face—my face. The kitchen counter and table rendered all lonely and unbearably poetic in the pulsing of the lights. In these moments, I felt gripped with something I still don’t know the name of. But here is the proof that I remember the poetry of it, the magic of it—the quiet, the darkness, the aloneness, the light.
The fundamental belief that you are unlovable and something is deeply wrong with you is a diagnostic criteria for many of what we call mental illnesses: pathological, or pathologized, alienation. So many of us feel that something about us is fundamentally wrong, broken, or that we’d be rejected if only we were really known.
At first, I take the notes on my writing and try to raise the stakes, provide adequate context for the emotional tension that I present to my readers, and a sketch of a narrator to hold it all together. Then, I begin to question.
I want the work to look like me. And I lack, I think, a distinct sense of self. We talk so often about the external details of nonfiction writing, but so little about the internal landscape with which we approach writing nonfiction. It feels like lying to craft a grounded, present, and whole narrator for the pleasure of readers—inside and outside of workshop.
I try to reframe. Instead of considering the lack of a sense of selfhood as a condition, perhaps temporary, that may one day be resolved through better writing, I experiment with it as something to celebrate. It is, in fact, about me. The absence of the narrator is a choice that I am making, a choice not to perform. A choice to make my interior known. You startthinking like me. The absence of the narrator is a part of the artist’s vision, and, in turn, a fundamental part of the art.
Turn right, then left, then right again. The glow of uncurtained windows down the road draws me in. I’m a moth-to-be in a two-ton steel chrysalis bumping up against the windows of rows and rows of homes, impeccably lit for observation, serendipitously empty of their inhabitants. I’ve moved into a more attainable neighborhood full of single-level homes, cozily cluttered or stacked floor-to-ceiling with books. A glowing green bankers’ lamp in the window of a dark house reminds me of the one we had, also from my Illinois grandma, sitting on the piano growing up.
My parents sold my childhood home and moved out while I was living here, in Alaska. I am grateful for this, I think. I wouldn’t have known how to say goodbye. I told my therapist once that my family haunted our own house. You couldn’t turn a corner without bumping into a memory, couldn’t walk up the stairs in the dark without feeling something behind you. She commended me for my insight. I wonder if the new family ever hears the pat pat of my bare feet on the wooden floor at night, the creak of the stairs. I wonder if, when they draw the curtains at night, they catch a glimpse of my face in the reflection of the dark windows.
The snow dampens the noise, so I’m wrapped up tight and held.
Back to bigger houses again, on my left and my right. This one with a windowed garage, different-sized bikes lining the plain white walls. The next giant garage, bare and sterile except for a huge poster, like an early 2000s teen movie, of a red sports car.
The homes, always empty. Me, rolling by quietly, appreciating the décor—tiny, ordinary glee. A brief moment suspended in someone else’s life.
Only when I drive by a bar with a line wrapped around the block does the reverie end. The studs in my tires grate against the naked asphalt audibly. The snow here has melted because it’s a busy enough street. I turn my music back on, speed back up.
When I get back to my home, the overpriced beige apartment in the middle of town that I like unreasonably much, I shuffle to my room and get ready for bed in the dark. It only takes my eyes a moment to adjust. I don’t leave the lights on when I’m out of the house—thinking of the electric bill, after all—and really, I don’t need the light anyways. I already know where everything is.
Audrey Coble is a writer of creative nonfiction and disability researcher living on Dena’ina land in Anchorage, Alaska. They hold an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (2024), and their work has been featured in Apocalypse Confidential, Hex Literary, Bruiser Mag, and more. Find them online at audreycoble.space.
