These words dropping onto this blank screen leaked off a bottle of emotions I had dammed. It has been months ago since a rejection note sneaked into my inbox—a single line in bold letters; it’s not the first, but the latest of ten I have received so far. Reading the note, I felt sand in my eyes, pain that brings on tears.
Why must rejection wring the mind so? I had long struggled to understand. No matter how cavalier I talk of my writing, rejection feels like murder at times. It must be during those times when I wrote too hard and too long so much so that an illusion of perfection shrouded me, or the fragile cave—my heart—from which I always imagine I write.
From what do words get birthed anyway? This has always been a mystery to me akin to my search for God. But this I believe in, the universe came to be—out of nothing—because God so decreed it with words.
I feel I am a being out of nothing. My words, thus, burst onto a screen from the void. Why then must rejection affect me so? I and what words I string together as soon as they slip into some kind of form should turn into objects like asteroids flinging their way through the universe. I, who worked on it, and that which they have birthed into, should no longer bear any of me.
And yet, complex as is my tiny mind, it also bloats with greed and feels as if words it has put into shape become the universe. How dare then, does anyone reject it?
But I am grateful for each rejection note; it shoves me back into place. The eye does not see the self in whole, only in parts. Rejection hurts only in part. As in every object in the universe, other parts of me that have been spared soon take over and begin to birth again.
