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Metal

Every time is like the first time. Palms shaking and sweaty, heart pounding away in my chest so loudly that I’m sure everyone can hear, my face getting red with fear.  The gloved hands approaching my face, that long needle covered in plastic drawing nearer and nearer. Just like every other time, I screw my eyes shut tight, and hold my breath.

Pain, exquisitly sharp and focused, as the needle goes through the skin, breaking it completely. Another burst of pain as the needle is taken out and the metal bar is put in. Until this moment, it is all the same every single time.

But after… Well, after is a different story. After the piercing process is done, I can breath a sigh of relief and smile, looking at the newest metal piece in my body. I carry the dull ache of the new hole all day and the days that follow, but it doesn’t bother me so much anymore, because I’ve done it before and I know how to deal with it. It’s the fear of the pain that makes those few minutes on the piercer’s table so awful every time.

My total count is now eleven, three in the face, eight in the ears. Eleven is a good number.

Sweet Relief – and Some Zombies

I just finished my application for the University of California schools. Meaning three campuses, three schools really. UCLA, Berkeley and Santa-Cruz. The application process was long and grueling, confusing and upsetting, disturbing and tiring and most of all FINISHED. It’s finished.

My brain feels so incredibly fried up and used and dried and broken and exhausted and strange and zombified. But at least I got this done. It’s a wonderful feeling, to have the weight of the first deadline off my mind. True, four down and still fifteen to go, but that’s something nonetheless.

In celebration, and laziness, a haiku to explain the way my head feels:

Zombies ate my brain,
Because zombies don’t eat trees,
Carnivorous swine.

My Goal – To Have Voices In My Head

Writing descriptions is all very well, but no work of fiction is complete without dialogue. It doesn’t have to be incredible, it doesn’t have to be witty, it doesn’t have to be much – except that you have to be able to hear it. You have to able to have two characters, two characters that feel real, and you have to know that when you’re reading, or in my case writing, their conversation, you can actually hear two distinct voices in your head that make sense.

You wouldn’t think that would be such a hard thing to practice. It is though. I’ve realized lately that I love writing descriptions and indeed, I know I write them fairly well, at least well enough. But I don’t know, or rather haven’t attempted to know, how to write dialogue, and that’s bad. I need to learn how. The problem is that I can’t just practice dialogue for the sake of itself. I need to have a situation, characters, voices that I can clearly imagine.

I’m not managing to find a way to practice this. I might be obsessing over something silly, but I truly feel I need to learn to write believable conversations. And for that I’ll need people, stories. So that’s what I’m going to try to work on in the next few days.

Insert-Thriller-Novel-Name-Here: Preface

Most stories begin with a person. Some stories begin with an object – an enchanted ring, a lone chair in a meadow, strange stuff like that.

This here story begins with nothing. Not an object, and not a person. It begins with absolutely nothing, that is to say, just a vast, empty space, all contained inside a small test tube. The test tube is full of nothing. Vacuum. The absence of matter – all matter, liquid or solid or gas.

I sat there watching that emptiness and I tried to understand it. Tried to comprehend the meaning of total, utter emptiness. I couldn’t really understand it, no matter how hard I stared at it. This was when I was a young boy, seeing  vacuum in the science lab for the first time.

Now, I feel as if I am facing an uncomprehensible loss, and now, as it was then, I’m staring at what is in front of my eyes and I cannot understand this emptiness, this lack that I’m facing.

How could I have gotten myself into this situation? How have I screwed myself over like this? Not for the first time, I wish I could turn back the clock…

I spend all my time between calls at work scribbling in my notebook. I was going to try to write some dialogue because I must practice that, and instead I wrote a weird preface to a cheap thriller novel about someone who’s lost everything due to something or other. Ah well, the creative mind takes us odd places, I suppose.

Original Barbie

Did you know that once upon a time, Barbie was a red-head? She was, indeed. She had red hair, shortish, only down to her neck. She had dark eyes, not blue. She was super-duper thin of course, but that’s just how it is, I suppose.

Skipper, Barbie’s sister or friend or something, was the blond one. She was shorter, and she had the long blond hair and blue eyes. Sometime over the years, Barbie became her sister apparently, and only her chest seemed to keep growing – ah yes, Skipper was completely flat-chested.

Also, all the original Barbie clothes were properly adorable. They weren’t flashy, they weren’t made of plastic material and they didn’t have velcro. No, the original clothing was all real cloth, with miniature zippers and buttons and real pleats in the skirts, and a real shine to the cocktail dresses. All the shoes fit properly and were actually sturdy. Those clothes were so beautiful.

The reason I know all this is because I’m sentimental, overly so, and I actually have the same Barbie-box that my mom had when she was a girl. It’s tucked away deep under my desk, but once in a while I delve into it out of curiosity and actually envy Miss Redhead for her clothing.

Popular Haunt

Every small city has to have at least one spooky place. We have ours, alright. Oh yes, we do. As girls, me and a couple of my friends actually went into the single abandoned and, of course, reputedly haunted house. We’re alive to tell the tale, amazing as it sounds.

The house is truly creepy. It is set back from the street, and you have to climb a long set of winding, falling apart, stone stairs that are cut right into the wall of boulders that the house sits on. The stairs are overgrown with weeds, stinging plants and thorns a necessity. When you reach the top of the steps, there is a locked gate, and climbing over it is quite painful, the plants getting in the way constantly, and the gate is so rusty that your hands come away caked in brown metal shavings.

Then there is the house itself. The story goes that the architect – or sculptor? – that lived there just moved away and left the house to decay and no one knows why he didn’t sell it, because it’s big. The creepy thing is, it used to be rather clean inside. The house is completely empty, and is very like a maze – there are two separate wings to it, and the only way to get from one to the other is by crossing through the balcony. The tap in the kitchen is rusted shut, and the doors are all gone or creaking slowly in the wind that moves through the house. There is even a loft, its stairs mysteriously gone, and no way to get up there.

My friends and I sneaked in there a few times when we were younger – even at night once or twice. Sadly, over the years it has become less spooky and much more a place for teenage drunkards to crash. It is now full of people’s exceretians, spray paint and even a couch someone had the strength to drag up there, and it has pentagrams and funny drunken messages painted on the walls. The creep factor is there, but now it is more “Ew, it stinks and some drunk guy will attack me” rather than “Oh god, oh god, I swear this place is haunted, I swear, I swear!”

“Innocense”

Left in a meadow where flowers always bloom
A little girl dances forever,
Playing with her dolls and teddy bears and blankies.
She never cries, never sighs, never needs a hug,
She’s perfectly content knowing that everything,
Everything is fine. All is well.
Sometimes she pauses,
Raises her eyes to the heavens,
And tries to grasp at a forgotten memory,
-Or perhaps a vision-
Of a darker girl,
A dangerous, wild and wonderful girl.
But the feeling of something forgotten fades,
And the girl lives on obliviously
In her meadow of innocence.

I wrote this poem… sometime. I don’t actually remember when, but I stumbled across it while going through some of my old poems and I rather liked the imagery, so I thought I’d post it.

Friday Afternoon

So peaceful, so quiet. The buses don’t work and most people are napping, leaving the streets free of smog and full of children’s laughter and noise. Many kids are on their way to the Scouts meeting. They’ll be noisy once they really get started, but they’re still quiet, in their own building, not yet scattering across the park and playing.

The light has grown dim early, as it always seems to do on Friday afternoons, and there’s a cool, almost chilling, breeze coming in through the slats of the window. There is something so odd about the quiet. Just when it starts to feel eerie, though, a car whooshes past and reminds me that humanity is still there, life is still moving around me.

A sense of calm prevails over every other atmosphere. There can be nothing urgent on this afternoon. Time doesn’t really mean much right now. It feels like the sphere of this point in time and space is just an endless, calm, quiet thing, stretching on until forever. The ticking hands of the clocks betray the lie to that feeling though, and I sigh.

Tearing my eyes away from the spot they’ve been fixed on aimlessly for the past five minutes, I need to give myself a little shake to free myself from the cobwebs. I need to get back to reality now.

Princess Without A Name [A Short Story]

Once upon a time, there was a princess who didn’t have a name. She lived locked up in a tower, like all princesses do, and had a jolly life there. She got plenty of exercise in the big swimming pool at the bottom of the tower, and read plenty of books in the big library on the first floor of the tower, and had plenty of food in the pantry on the second floor and got plenty of time to gaze outside wistfully from the one window that was on the third floor of the tower. It was a very good tower, as towers went.

The princess without a name was very happy there. She lived her life all alone, except for the girls that came to restock the pantry, and only read about other people in books. She had all the different stories of princesses in the library, and she knew how her story would go. She knew exactly what would happen with her life.

She felt lucky, knowing exactly what was to be. She felt glad to think that one day, her eighteenth birthday probably, or somewhere around that age, a prince would come riding on a white, or maybe black, horse. He would save her from the tower by breaking into it or climbing up it – or doing something else that was very athletic. Then he’d pledge his true love to her, and they would ride off together into the sunset and live happily ever after. The princess without a name liked the sound of happily ever after. It sounded like a nice way to live, though rather vague.

As her eighteenth birthday started drawing near, the princess without a name started worrying about two things. The first was that all the maidens and princesses in the stories had names. Not very good ones, no – for what sort of a name is Cinderella? Or Snow White for that matter? Stupid names really – but they still had names. The princess without a name had no name at all. She never really thought about it. She knew who she was, and that was that. She never felt she needed a name.

The second thing she worried about was that she would have to leave her tower. She really liked her tower, being stocked as it was with good things to do and to eat and to read. She even had a few friends, if she thought about it – the girls from the village who opened the tiny window in the pantry and gave her food every week. The window was much too small to escape from of course, but the girls liked having nice chats and the princess without a name rather liked hearing about their lives, unprincess-like as they might be.

Mind filled with worries, one of which being the creases in her brow from being so worried, the princess without a name’s birthday came and went and no prince or horse came near the tower. As the days passed, she started to forget a little about it. She kept about her routine, and even had the village girls find a few dozen new books to add to the library.

Still, fate is fate, and the day before the princesses nineteenth birthday, a prince appeared. He came riding – of course he did – but on quite an odd black and white horse that looked rather like a tall cow. His face looked very sweaty and his chain-mail wasn’t very shiny, but rather caked with mud. The princess without a name looked down at him from her window at the top of the tower and waited.

“O, fairest of maidens! Princess of these lands! I am Pip, and I have come to rescue you!” He shouted up at her, rather as if declaiming, badly, from a page. The princess stifled a giggle. Pip?!

“O lovely lady, will you tell me your name?” He shouted then, his voice breaking on the high pitch he put on the word “name.”

“I don’t have a name,” called down the princess. The prince blinked a few times. He looked like he was thinking very hard, and not managing well with it.

“Well, then after I rescue you, I’ll give you one, O star of mine!” He eventually yelled, sounding, and looking, rather pleased with himself at the solution he found for this unexpected development. The princess thought to herself. She looked back into the comfy tower room, her bedroom, and sighed a bit. She looked out at the prince and sighed once more.

“Maybe once you break in, we can live here?” She asked the prince a moment later. She really did like the tower. She heard the prince laugh an odd, trilling little laugh.

“Why, lady, I have a castle waiting for us far away from here,” The prince called back, still giggling. “That is where we shall live, get married and have our children! Why, this little place is scarcely enough to hold one little princess, how could it hold a family and servants and courtiers?” The princess without a name cringed at his words. A family? Servants? Courtiers? She wasn’t even nineteen. She wasn’t ready for all that. Happily ever after had always been vague, true, but never had she heard about the happy couples having babies and servants and courtiers straight off. Also, the princes has always been sweet, not annoying and fake like this one/. And they were never called Pip. And their horses looked nice.

The princess thought the matter over for a few more minutes while Pip, who had assumed that she wanted to be rescued already, toiled away at the door of the tower, trying to hack at it with his sword and muttering things like “Have at you!” and “Open sesame!”

“Pip! Hey, Pip!” She called, trying to get his attention away from her faithful door that was solid oak and seemed quite unwilling to let him in. Once Pip looked up at her, wiping sweat from his brow with his hand, she continued.

“Pip, your offer is so kind. But, you see, the thing is,” and she giggled with pleasure at the cliché from all the romance novels that she was about to use, “I’m not really willing to settle for less than the perfect one for me. And you’re not him, Pip. I’m sorry, but you can stop trying to break in. I don’t want to leave.” With those words, the princess who didn’t want a name given to her turned, walked into the depths of the tower and went for a long, aggressive swim in her pool.

She never saw Pip staring in shock at the tower. Nor did she see him hacking hopelessly at the door a few times. Nor did she see the big brass key that hung next to the door on the inside of the tower, just like she hadn’t ever seen it. She would see that key one day, when she wanted to. She would see the key and she would open the door for the knight she wanted and until then she had no need to know that she had the key all along. Her tower was enough for her and would be enough for her until the day she would choose that it wasn’t.

Hmm.

It is immensely satisfying to have a long, hard, stressful day and to come home at night and know that it’s almost done, and you’re still okay. There’s something so comforting about the knowledge that you can live with routine, really get into it and be fine, despite the fact that it’s difficult. It really makes you proud of yourself to know that you can look at the things you still have left to do in a day and be able to organize them rationally and logically without freaking out or hyperventilating.

I rarely experience this feeling, being the bundle of nerves, hormones and moods that I usually am. I normally cannot really shake off the annoyance or the bad mood that clings to me. But once in a while, there is this feeling of peace that settles over me despite knowing that the day is not quite done yet, that I still have things left untended to. Knowing that I still have yet more to do tomorrow and not freaking out about it is a rare things as well.

God, being a teenager is weird – it’ll be pretty sweet to be able to say one day that being in a good mood is the norm and that bad moods are rare and not quite as spur of the moment as they are today.