Malachi and I

ESTHER

“You’re a terrible writer,” said Malachi the Merciless as he drank his morning coffee. His thick-framed glasses were perched on his nose as he read from my laptop.

“Wow, thanks,” I muttered as I tried to take it back but he pushed my hand away and continued reading.

“You’re a beautiful thinker. I can see what it is you want to say but you’re just making things complicated.” He frowned as he scrolled back up to the top of the document. “You were an English major, right?”

“So were you.”

“I hated my classes though.” He took off his glasses and turned to look at me directly. “Everyone was pretentious. They always wanted to be the next Shakespeare, Fitzgerald or Salinger, writing in prose they did not understand while throwing symbolism into your face.”

“Tell us how you really feel.” Geez.

“You’re a terrible writer because you’re not the one writing. Your fingers are typing, but the words on the page come from every last professor and English teacher you have ever had. You are not Shakespeare, Fitzgerald or Salinger. Those people wrote in an era when reading was the greatest form of entertainment. Everyone was, in a way, an English major. But now they are not, we are a rare breed so we need to write simpler and do it with much more conviction,” he stated as he handed my laptop back to me.

I stared at him without taking the laptop from his outstretched arm and he waved it in front of my face.

“Careful, I just bought this.” I took it from him quickly.

“You’re the one who was staring at me as if wings had suddenly sprouted from my back,” he muttered as he reached for his coffee. “Not a very attractive look for you if I do say so myself.”

“See? I was admiring you for a moment and then you just had to go and ruin it by reverting back to your old jerk of a self.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” I said as I walked towards my tote bag.

“Admiring me for what?”

I turned back to face him thinking he was just teasing me but he looked mildly curious.

“Seriously?”

“What?” He questioned with annoyance growing in his tone.

“Malachi, a couple days ago I didn’t know who you were. I knew your words. I knew your stories and they moved me profoundly. You were Malachi Lord. I kept thinking to myself, If I could just sit in a room with this guy and have a conversation for an hour, I…I’d leap for joy. I would be so happy. You were here…” I lifted my hand and raised it over my head. “And I was here…” I put my hand to my chest. “…fangirling with the rest of the world.”

“And now?” he asked as he took a sip of his coffee. He seemed so unaffected and it annoyed me so much.

I flipped my hands around. “Now you’re just Malachi.”

“Ummm.”

“Ummm?” Why ask if he didn’t care. “I express my disappointment—”

“If I fell from a pedestal you put me on, it’s your fault, not mine.” He pushed back. “All I did was tell my story. The story of my life…my lives. I didn’t say I was wise. I didn’t say I was a conversationalist. I didn’t say I was a good person. Nor was I supposed to be idolized. I didn’t say anything at all.”

I’d never thought of myself as slow but for some reason it was only then that I was able to connect the dots.

“You remember the life and then you write it down. You aren’t writing stories, you’re writing journals,” I whispered that last part to myself.

“Yes.” He nodded as he wiped his hands. “I write my truth and I can’t give you anything less than that.”

How had I missed this? Why was I only just realizing that? The big ones. “I…When you told me about Romeo and Juliet—I mean Romeo and Giulietta, I thought it was only the big romances. The ones we all know. But—”

“I write about the ones history forgot,” he said softly as he stood directly in front of me. His blue eyes were fatigued but it was almost like…like he felt bad for me. Not himself but me. “I write them because the love in that life was just as important as the ones in which we were Kings and Queens. When we were on top of the world, I loved her, and when we fell to the bottom, I still loved her—rich, poor, king, slave, farmer, scholar, black, brown, yellow, and white. I loved her. So all of those lives, those memories, what the world calls stories matter.”

The more I thought about it the more pain I felt. I remembered the pain of those characters…of him…and Li-Mei.