What I Learned at the Reading of My New Short Play

Being a writer is a strange kind of grace.

You sit down at a desk, or in your car, or on the edge of your bed at 2 a.m., and suddenly the rules of the world loosen. Time bends. People come back. Conversations that never happened begin to take shape.

I’ve been writing a play about my estranged step-grandmother. About a conversation we never had. A conversation we couldn’t have, really—not with the way things unfolded, not with the silences that calcified over time, not with the particular brand of distance that settles into a family and makes itself at home.

In real life, there was no final scene. No moment of clarity. No softened ending where we found each other across the divide. She died, and the space between us stayed exactly as it was—unfinished, unmapped, unresolved.

But on the page, something else becomes possible.

On the page, I can sit across from her. I can let her speak. I can ask the questions I was too young, too unsure, or too afraid to ask. I can let her answer in ways that feel true, even if I’ll never know if they’re real. I can build a version of her that is complicated and contradictory and human—someone who might explain herself, or refuse to, or try and fail and try again.

Writing doesn’t fix what happened. It doesn’t rewrite history in any literal sense. The past remains stubbornly intact. But writing lets me explore the emotional truth of it all.

It’s not about creating a perfect ending. If anything, it’s about allowing the mess to exist fully.

And sometimes, that’s the closest thing to a conversation you’ll ever get.

It doesn’t change the past.

But it changes how you carry it.