To Bea or Not to Bea

At the turn of the 20^th century, when political movements were springing up left and right and the world as a whole was far too absorbed in its own self-importance, Sheila Bea was less interested in the photographs that were formed using new-fangled flash lamps, and far more intrigued by the way common everyday words could be strung together to create fantastical alien worlds and rebellion-inciting ideas inside the minds of those around her.

For what joy would anything in the world hold, even such exciting things as photographs, if we had not words to express our excitement or share our ideas with others? These are the kinds of thoughts that ran through Sheila’s mind as if on a track: perpetually returning to the forefront even as they began to recede to the back. Such thoughts kept her from wasting precious time speculating on all the exciting technological advances being made and all the countless ways in which they would change and improve people’s everyday lives. Instead, she remained religiously devoted to writing down every thought, observation, and feeling in a deceptively unremarkable notebook that was never farther from her person than arm’s length.

If she wasn’t writing in her little notebook, she was reading from equally small – yet largely remarkable – books of poetry. While she enjoyed the musings of Elizabeth Chandler, Felicia Hemans, and Elizabeth Browning, she found true enlightenment in the work of Emily Dickinson.

Her copy of Emily Dickinson’s poetry was the most worn and faded book on her shelf. And Sheila would tell anyone who hadn’t yet heard the story – as well as those who had heard it at least a dozen more times than they would have liked – that Emily Dickinson herself had appeared to Sheila in a dream and told her to start writing. The very next day Sheila went and bought her first small notebook and had been writing ever since, certain that she was destined to become as great a writer as her idol, Emily Dickinson. 

At first, the notebook’s blank pages had seemed like so many countless and exciting opportunities to touch people’s hearts and change their perceptions of the world. But, as many frustrated and equally confident creatives before her, she soon and often found herself staring at the book’s cream-colored virgin pages with a frustration that bordered on outright abhorrence.

This page holds all the potential in the world to be great, and I am wholly incapable of making it so. The first time this thought took hold of her, it shocked her into action and she wrote as furiously as she could to fill the very page that had so taunted her and pricked her pride. But try as she might to beat it back, the thought spread as quickly as the plague or the Spanish influenza. Even when she felt well enough to declare herself fully recovered, it was not long before she was once again inflicted with the recognition of her own creative failings. She was not great. She could not do with an entire empty notebook what her hero and idol, Emily Dickinson, could do with a single blank page; and so, she felt herself an utter failure.

Sheila took to wearing all white and swore she would never marry in an attempt to channel Dickinson’s creative spirit, but all to no avail. Then, when Sheila’s parents died suddenly in a boating accident, and the overwhelming realization of how little time she may have to accomplish her writing dreams began pecking away at her already frail psyche, she threw herself into her writing with a crazed and utterly hopeless abandon.

Sheila’s aunt, worried for her health, begged her to leave off writing for a bit and escape to the seashore with her family to grieve and find solace in the arms of those who loved her.

Her aunt’s proposal was met with utter contempt, and although Sheila politely saw her aunt to the door, her niece’s parting words left her feeling more worried than when she had arrived. Countless other friends and relatives came to visit in the days and weeks following the death of Sheila’s parents, but she refused to receive them and spoke only the same final words she had said to her aunt:

“Leave me to my writing, for I will either be as great as Emily Dickinson or I simply will not be!”

When she could take their constant interruptions and intrusions into her solitude no longer, she used her meager inheritance to purchase a small house several miles outside of town. She decided to seclude herself as fully bodily as she already had mentally, and swore she would remain alone until she had written something as exceptional as even the lowliest of Dickenson’s poems.

Because it was early in June and the house had a small but overflowing garden and there was a nearby creek, her friends and relatives promised to let her be and watched with slight bemusement as she took nothing but her writing desk, her copy of Dickinson’s poetry, several small notebooks, and a crate of pens and ink with her into her new life.

They all waited expectantly for news of her great works, but the weeks came and went and not so much as a line or the ghost of a stanza was received from the woman who swore to one day be as great as Emily Dickinson.

Around the time the leaves began to change, her father’s sister thought to check on her niece and see if she was in need of any foodstuff. Expecting her niece’s garden to be practically bare, she brought along several jars of canned fruits and vegetables.

However, when not even halfway to her niece’s home in the woods, her path was blocked by the large trunk of a fallen tree. Its dark, blackened corpse was littered with all manner of worms and beetles, and even if she had been strong enough to lift it out of the path, she couldn’t, for it would have surely rotted away in her arms. She was forced to go around it and, as she did, thought gladly on the fact that she wasn’t the sort of woman to believe in such silly things as omens – good or otherwise.

When she finally reached the clearing in which her niece’s first home had been built, the jars of food she had brought fell from her arms and shattered on the earth around her as she looked on in silent horror at the scene that befell her eyes. Where once a strong oak house had stood, with her niece and all of her writings inside it, now only a thin layer of ashes dusted the ground in a morbid perversion of the season’s first snowfall. 

She called out instinctively for Sheila, but immediately knew she would receive no response. Her niece was gone, and all the writing into which she had put her life with her. An unshakeable chill pierced her heart as she considered her niece’s parting words to her the last time they had met.

Although the town papers would later claim it had been an accident, the gravestone that Sheila’s friends and family had placed in the clearing to mark her final resting place told the real – if incomplete – story of the woman who would now never be as great as Emily Dickinson:

Sheila Bea

1881-1899

“And so, I simply will not be”