I’ve been collecting snores from the first night we slept together. No sex yet, just sleeping—passed out on a friend’s couch after a night of wildness, back when we were wild, back when we ordered tequila shots with lime…
First-person POV can get complicated when you’re in the business of making stuff up. Inevitably, there will be people who wonder if you—the writer—are the narrator. This can happen even if the story is in third person, but it’s especially prevalent when you’re throwing around words like “I” and “me.” I really don’t have Mason jars in my basement. I don’t even have a basement anymore.
What I do have are several storage bins full of diaries.
I started journaling in fifth grade and didn’t stop until I graduated from college, so there are upwards of fifty handwritten volumes stuffed in our attic. I’d forgotten about them until recently, when my teenager asked for a peek into my past, and together we unearthed the bins and brushed off the cobwebs and cried with laughter as we flipped through entries I’d written when I was her age. Everything was The Biggest Deal Ever: braces, softball tryouts, school dances, first crushes. The agonizing uncertainty of how it would all turn out.
There’s a solid chance this is the origin of my loyalty to first-person POV. I love writing in first person. I love reading it. It’s the immediacy, the way you don’t even have to give the narrator a name or a gender, the way it can somehow feel universal and simultaneously off-limits—like peering into someone’s diary. It is my unparalleled favorite point of view. So for now, I’m not ready to abandon it (or my beloved em dashes, which were sprinkled across every page even then).
Instead, more and more, I find myself infusing some of the scarier themes—parenthood, anxiety, trauma, death, marriage—with an element of absolute impossibility. First, because it helps serve as a quiet reminder: this is not completely real. Second, because writing about impossible things is a joy.
This is one of those rare stories that poured out in one sitting and looked largely similar from first to final draft. But no matter how much I tinkered, something felt unfinished. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why. In the first iteration, it was crystal clear whether the husband lived or died, and I thought: How can it get more finished than this? Here is the answer. This is how it ends.
I read the last two lines over and over for weeks. They felt empty. They felt fake, which is a strange thing to say when you’re writing about collecting snores in Mason jars.
It wasn’t until I experimented with taking the answer away that I realized: somehow, uncertainty was the answer. Teenagers who write angsty diary entries don’t yet have a definitive conclusion to their endings—and neither do many thirty-somethings, or forty-somethings, or eighty-somethings. Maybe fiction doesn’t require one either. The whole terrible, swirling beauty of it is that you never know.
MELISSA BOWERS is a recent winner of the Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize in Prose and has also won first place in the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest, the F(r)iction flash fiction competition, the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize, and The Writer’s personal essay contest. Her work has twice been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 as well as the Best Small Fictions anthology, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, River Teeth, and The Forge, among others.
