Negative of an Achievement
by Eli Dupree

None of Michelle Agnesi's books ever sold very well.
Well, none of them were very inspiring. Perhaps a few people would have bought them, read them, briefly wondered why the author wasn't better known... then put them on the shelf, and never looked at them again. And then perhaps a few years later, they would hear, by chance, the name Agnesi, and remark, "Why, I once read a novel by an author of that name; it was rather nice... No, I'm afraid I don't recall the title..."
As it turns out, she wouldn't have minded terribly; she never expected to turn much of a profit by anything she wrote. An instinctive storyteller, she would slip into telling anecdotes in everyday conversation, and she wrote in her spare time on whatever paper came to hand. Nobody ever told her that writing could be more than a hobby.
I guess she didn't figure it out on her own.
There she was in high school, an unremarkable student, friends with anyone who would listen. Most people noticed her; they learned to recognize her short stature, round face, clear voice... they learned nothing deeper. No one noticed her getting excited because she didn't; no one saw her morose because she never was; they didn't think about her again.
Her teachers couldn't complain about her performance, but they didn't like her spending her class time scrawling stories on the backs of old papers... They didn't think anything should be more important to her than what they were trying to teach her. They told her that you couldn't make a living scrawling on the backs of old papers. She didn't listen, but she never considered that they might be wrong.
There she was in college - her parents sent her - and there even the professors would listen to her sometimes. They saw her talent for storytelling, realized how self-motivated she was, and let her follow her own path. Her friends looked at what she was doing and told her she should be a writer, but she didn't listen because of that idea, that of course you can't make a living as a writer. They couldn't protest because she never said it; they couldn't see the issue because it was the negative of an issue.
Not all of them were so blind. Sashana - tall, lively, and timid, a far more distinctive figure than Michelle - wasn't very good at academics, but she tended to see what others didn't. Once Sashana came to know Michelle, she admired her for her unconscious skill: what Sashana had a hard time working out, Michelle could do without thinking... yet, what Michelle would never have considered, Sashana came to understand. In her own time, she befriended Michelle, and encouraged her to follow her heart.
Not long after, Sashana collapsed under her workload and dropped out before she would flunk out.
What can I say? No one else was ever so close to Michelle. Most of her friends listened politely and put other priorities first. She had a few boyfriends but was too smart to keep them for very long. No one knew how to reach her, to draw her out... the main reason her books didn't sell well was that she never got around to writing them.
What can I say? She frittered away a year after she graduated, and then, in need of a job, went back to work as a secretary at her old high school. That's where she is now - sitting at the front of an office, smiling a shallow smile at visitors, telling her stories of unfulfillment to anyone who will listen.

~(September 2007)