“You know, you’d be much less miserable if you stopped convincing yourself that you’re miserable.”

I told a coworker that this morning, pointing my finger into his chest, frustrated beyond coherence with his constant grumbling and whining of, “Hayleyyyy, please kill me now…”

His response was to whine and tell me that not everyone can keep smiling through scads of tourists who can’t speak English well enough to pay for their high-priced, high-maintenance espresso drinks or the dozens of burns and cuts that we all endure every day.  I am, in fact, currently typing this though two Band-Aids and three greasy patches of burn salve.  Said coworker went on to assert that he was unable to find any happiness in making methodical drinks or in the way that our fingertips are blackened from all of the sludge on hundreds of thousands of people’s dollars as we take them in exchanges so impersonal that it’s taken me months to learn the names of even the guests who come in daily.

But guess what?

Neither can I.

I smile through work because I live inside my head, allowing the tedium employing my hands to free my mind to interview and nitpick and love my characters, or — in the brief times that I can look up and into the sea of Manhattanites — create parallels and new characters out of the faces I see.

Until I was in third grade, I didn’t know that it would be possible for me to create characters.  Sure, I sometimes wrote stories with little names that I liked taking the place of my own for the protagonists, but I didn’t really consider them characters — just fake versions of myself.  I assumed that I had to write stories about the characters that greater minds had birthed — Gloria Gopher, Kirsten Larson, Karen Brewer, Jesse Bear — because the act of creating a whole new person (or anthropomorphic thing) seemed sacred and mystical.  I wrote hundreds of stories in preschool, kindergarten, early elementary school, all using the characters that other people created, just because I legitimately believed that I was not worthy of such a thing.  I was just a kid, I couldn’t make a person.

In third grade, my teacher finally told me that I couldn’t keep writing about other people’s characters because it was a breach of copywright.

I… was shocked.

Not only COULD I create characters… but I was SUPPOSED to invent these people for the stories in my mind?  I could put names to the faces that crowded mental corners and give them likes and dislikes and backgrounds and histories and parents and siblings and favorite foods and enemies and quirks like preferring to wear socks with pom-poms (which one of my first independent characters did)?

It was, perhaps, the most profound epiphany I had ever had.

It may still be.  It’s debatable.

I filled notebook after notebook (mostly with Lisa Frank covers) with… characters.  Writing stories became eclipsed by the compulsive need to create people, to know everything about them, down to the scent of their shampoo and the shape of their pinkie toenails.  I cut pictures out of magazines and catalogues to tape onto pages for visual reminders of “this hair color!” or “she likes this sweater!”

I still have every character I ever created.  Most of their stories never existed, and most of them probably never will.  But I see them, sometimes, still lurking around in my brain, looking at me plaintively and wondering if they’ll ever get to DO anything.

The main character of Green was one such lurker.  She’s a lucky one, though, she came with half a story already.  I just needed to nap in Liz’s bed to find the other half (and, very thankfully, I did).

So when I’m at work, and it looks like I’m smiling at the toothless woman with a tongue ring and pigtails who stole all of our caramel sauce last week (WHO DOES THAT?!) and is ordering her fourth coffee refill of the day… I’m probably smiling at a new moment in the backstory of Green’s werewolf love interest, or a new trait for one of its minor characters, or reworking a bit of dialogue I’d written the night before so that it better fits with the soul I see in my head.

Creating characters still seems mystical to me, because more than creating people, which, technically, any post-adolescent person can do, it’s forging a soul.  That’s amazing to me. I don’t think it will ever stop seeming magical and I doubt that I will ever quite feel worthy.

So why shouldn’t I smile?

——–

An early story starring “Alexandra” (probably me) and “Jenny” (probably my neighbor Meghan.)