Of Ink and Water

I slip through the heavy double door that the stranger holds open for me. “Thanks,” I say, shaking the rain out of my hair and adjusting my now dangling bookbag after my mad sprint across the lawn. He mutters a nicety in a thick accent and keeps down the hall, wet sneakers squeaking on the yellow academic tiles as he goes.

The storm had come on like all Louisiana storms: sudden and violent, with drops like quarters and moving skies of ink and water. I flick a little more of it off my brows and hook a left for the stairwell, squelching my way to the third floor. It’s night and the halls are empty. Soft chatter spills from the only door that sits propped open with an old brick. Inside, the big fluorescents are off, my soggy classmates illuminated instead with the heap of lamps that have been plugged into every available outlet. I smile and sit, settling into a desk whose slick plastic and sleek metal feel more like the well-worn cushions of an old couch. Home may be two hundred miles away, down in the fraying hem of the state’s coast, but it’s here, too. In the small circle of desks that have been pushed to a tight circle, the extras collecting cobwebs in the corners. In the ten wet heads that tilt with interest and laugh and argue and interrupt. In the professor, with her Cambridge background and her radical political streak that shows quietly in the assigned reading, and her sure, mother-like voice. But most of all, in the pages. Even in the ones I dislike (which is most of them, her politics and mine rebuffing like matching magnetic fields). But it doesn’t matter. This is literature. This is writing. Both which I’ve been tasked with giving my full attention and effort.

Throughout my four years in college, people will tell me that The Arts won’t land me a real job. I almost believed them, too. And while I understand the well-meaning, and the reliability of an engineering degree, there is use here, too. I’d be twenty one when I graduated college. I’d be twenty five when I started using my degree. And I’d be twenty six when I finally believed in my degree, hanging my hat on her hook full-time.

All this to say, if writing, painting, sculpting, designing is what’s calling you–heed it. But heed it with a plan. Heed it with hard work, and a businesswoman’s mind. Keep showing up, again and again, to put in the work where people want it, and it will provide for you in ways you never imagined.

I want to know: What did you major in (if you went to school)? Do you use your major? Do you wish you did? Tell me.