I wrote a book between 2005 and 2006, that I never really tried to sell. I sent it out a bit and then gave up. It sits on my hard drive, and I think about it more than I care to say. Not a day goes by when it doesn't whisper to me and remind me that it's still there, waiting to be shown to the world but I make up an excuse and move on, ignore it for another day, work on something else.

Yesterday, after working for thirteen hours, I drove home around 10:30 and the streets were wet with rain, and empty of traffic. While circling around the neighborhood looking for parking, maybe the quiet music inspired me, maybe it was the rain-soaked night when it seemed like I was the only person left alive - either way, I began to think about my book again.

And I realized, suddenly, making some logical connection with a shocking amount of fear and sadness, that the reason I never sent the book out seriously, is that it isn't a very nice book.

I don't mean it isn't well written (of course I think it is) - but rather the material is so dark and the setting so leached of meaning that I don't think it's meant for anyone but me. When I wrote the book, it was at a time in my life when I was pretty happy - I was getting married, I was just getting used to living in the city - so I don't know where it came out of, but for whatever reason, I plumbed my darkest and blackest fears, and drained them all into this story.

Finally, someone pulled out of a parking spot in front of the park and I pulled into the space and waited for the song on the CD to finish. The windows were streaked with rain and the piano notes hung suspended inside the car, while the bass line rumbled underneath them. Through the wet and refracting glass, I saw the lights of the garden leading up to my building blurred into yellow smears and I shivered in the chill.

The book was all there in the car with me - the depressed girls, the desperate old man, the alien woman, the crippling poverty, the casual indifference, the deep holes of loneliness and alienation, the red smack of terror and the occasional bursts of violence that ripped jagged holes in the story. The rainy skies and the cold autumn winds, the lonely fields full of dead grass and still brackish ponds, the endless miles of asphalt and the gray strip malls. It was all there and a year after I finished the book, I was finally able to look it in the face and understand why I was afraid of it.

It was a window into all of my insecurities and fears, a peek under the skin, an expression of the depression and loneliness I suffered through for years, days spent without speaking a single word to anyone, months under the gray going from work to school to home to sleep for six hours only to wake and do it again five days a week for two years. If I had been rolled up and twisted like a wet rag and the black mess drained out of me was collected in a clear glass and examined - it would be like reading this book.

And like anything this personal, this intimately linked to my experience, this (failed) attempt at self-exorcism, it might be inaccessible to anyone else.

This isn't to say my feelings for the book have changed - I still think it's very good and readable, but I have some objective reference towards it now. And can understand its lack of appeal to others.

The song ended and I shut off the car, took my bag and umbrella, and walked out into the drizzle. By the time I walked into my apartment, I had already begun to feel better, and thought about stories that were not quite so bleak.