Retirement of a Secret Writer

by Billy Garcia

At the company I wrote product user guides, which no one ever read. At home, I kept journals in black composition notebooks that I stored in plastic shopping bags and stashed about the apartment: in my sock drawer, under the bathroom sink, in a cupboard above the stove next to the Tabasco. Those notebooks were not worth looking into. They were so internalized, so lonesome and cryptic, that I imagine if anyone ever chanced upon them, they would find little more of interest than some flat red roach, mummified from boredom on a page of troubled prose. Tired of being a secret writer, I finally put aside the mournful journals, the number two pencils, and the shunned step-by-step manuals. I changed jobs and got a girlfriend.

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Billy Garcia is a pen name for WPM, who is contributing editor of 3711 Atlantic.