is it better to miss by a mile or by just a few inches?
almost
almost…
you tell yourself
convinced the near misses mean something
tell yourself they taste vaguely like validation
but, then again, that’s a flavor you’re not very familiar with
… you’re used to a bitter palette of disappointment,
self-loathing, and a general sense of unjust exclusion
what’s that?
they say it’s the hope that kills you
but the only way to stop hoping is to brainwash yourself
into pessimism, and who the hell finds that even the least bit appealing?
really, if you keep going and haven’t quit
it means you still believe in hope
it means you’re moving forward, even with a modicum of evidence
hell, if all you can do is pretend you know what you’re doing,
you’re bound to encounter someone who believes in you
… and, well, that’s it right there,
life is all about struggling for a while until you
run into just the right kind of idiot who sees you
for more than who you are
— then, like nothing, you’ll find yourself on the threshold of glory
Garbage Notes:
I wrote this piece a while back after getting so very close to getting a short story accepted by a top-tier professional magazine. It would have been my first professional sale to an exceptionally good market. I made it past the slush readers, then past two more editorial rounds, only to get rejected at the last cut. It sucked and it hurt. Even with the fawning personal rejection, it hurt.
I’m not sure if the near misses mean anything more than getting axed early by some random slush reader. But I do know that a lot of your hard work has to go up against a whole hell of a lot of other variables—a myriad of factors in the minds of people who don’t even know you. And even then, you need more luck on top of that.
I’ve made up my mind to keep going regardless of the accolades or the external validation of getting published somewhere spectacular.
Hold on to hope or don’t, what matters most is that you put words down that you can be proud of.
I’m convinced this life is not about how much you can accumulate or how much you can impress others or how much status you can achieve. In my heart, I see the people who are miserable at the end of the day. They’re the ones who can’t find it in them to create anything—the ones who don’t have it in them to risk everything in the spirit of making something that might someday live beyond themselves.
The act. That’s all the evidence you need. That’s enough to move forward. I wrote this poem as a reaction to painful rejection. And even today, as I coincidentally sold a story that had been rejected FORTY times previously before finally landing a home, I realize that I loved the story all along, even when no one else did.
I mean it—at the end of this poem, I urge you to keep on struggling, because the time will come when someone WILL see you for more than what you think you are. And you’ll still be standing, ready to acknowledge it.
Franco Amati 2023
so close
"I see the people who are miserable at the end of the day. They’re the ones who can’t find it in them to create anything—the ones who don’t have it in them to risk everything in the spirit of making something that might someday live beyond themselves." I see these people as well. So I keep creating...but I'm only now, thx to some gentle nudging via Medium by Melissa Coffey, considering sending my stuff to a journal. I have taken rejection so hard and deeply devastatingly personally in the past. Perhaps now, at last, I can confront it...acknowledge its suckiness...remember your 40 tries...and keep submitting. Perhaps.
This is a great poem, Franco. I especially liked, "Hold on to hope or don’t, what matters most is that you put words down that you can be proud of." I agree. At the end of the day, that's all that really matters. At an extreme of the spectrum, even if I'm part of one percent of the population who relates to my writing, that one percent matters just as much as the other 99%.