life

The Little Moments

-I sat in the kitchen this morning, eating cereal and reading a book as usual. The book, A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham, is incredible. But my eyes kept straying to the big kitchen windows, and the glorious clouds visible through them. They were white and fluffy, but had grey lining in one direction, making them seem like an artists rendering in pencil.

-I looked at the salesman in the Nissan dealership, and I saw that he genuinely wanted to sell us a car. It was his job, and I knew he got paid by commission, but I appreciated the sincerity in his gaze, as well as his manners.

-My mom and I sat behind a gas station eating yogurts and brownies and chips, our only snack between about nine and four-thirty in the afternoon. The wind was blowing my hair all over the place, but it felt so nice, so comfortable. I could feel the hairs tingling on my arms with the slightest chill, but ignored it and turned my face into the wind.

-I was reunited with my book during my exercise walk. I read avidly, walking as fast as I could, but at the same time heard the silence of the afternoon settle around my pounding footsteps and my ragged breath. My sweat dripped down my forehead, but I was so immersed in my book that I hardly felt it.

-Chatting over coffee with my mom, I felt like an adult, trying to decide on a car to buy. My opinion meant something, and I could contribute. I’ve been doing this for a long time, ever since I aged almost overnight when I was fifteen years old, but it still feels like a marvel when I stop to think about it.

It’s the little moments, the good moments, that can make a day tolerable. They can even make it good.

Man and Wolf

There’s a full moon tonight.
It’s a werewolf moon.
It means that things are changing,
They’ll come to get you soon.
**
The man becomes the beast.
The violence is exposed.
Do you have some sympathy?
He’ll say it’s not what he chose.
**
The moon hides behind the clouds,
She’s playing hide and seek.
The man is howling in the woods,
The werewolf tries to speak.
**
The werewolf’s nature is its own,
Survival, eat and mate.
The man has passions, anger, guilt,
He thinks he has a fate.
**
The werewolf curls up quietly,
His pack is fast asleep.
The man is climbing up the trees,
Or digging six-foot deep.
**
The moon rises full again.
The werewolf’s gone afar.
But man has stayed right where he was,
His heart like stone, like tar.

Flash Fiction Thursday: Shana, Sorority Girl

Shana laughed, throwing back her head and opening her mouth wide. She had a laugh like no other, an uproarious, full-throated, loud laugh. At parties, people always looked behind them to see who had interrupted their shallow conversation so rudely, but then they saw Shana. After they watched her laugh, they couldn’t stay irritated.

“Are you, like, coming onto me?” Shana’s eyes were bright with mirth, her laughter having just subsided. She stared at the weedy, scrawny, pimpled freshman standing in front of her. He was resolutely holding up a bottle, ready to refill Shana’s shot-glass. It had taken mounds of courage for him to come up to her and ask, with what he thought was a sly, alluring smile, if she wanted a refill, babe.

“Well?” Shana’s eyes were already wandering, looking for someone else, someone cool and trendy and beautiful to talk to. There was quite a pick of young men – lots were in togas, this being their yearly let’s-crash-the-sorority-girls’-party-without-underpants-on event. Pimply freshman forgotten, she wandered over to where some tasty looking guys were gathered.

“Yo, hey, can you fine fellows pour a girl a drink or what?” She smiled coquettishly, her naturally blond hair flipping over one shoulder in an expert move to show off her bare shoulders. A black haired, toga-clad frat-boy turned to look at her. Shana’s smile disappeared. Her face fell, mouth hanging open stupidly, a look of shock stamped into her usually lovely features. The frat-boy looked her up and down, deliberately slowly, and grinned, revealing very pointed canines. When he spoke, Shana could feel the shiver creeping up her back like a line of ants.

“Hello, my heart. I told you we’d see each other again.”

“Some Fish Need Certain Bicycles”

I want to be very clear that the narrator of this poem is NOT ME. That is, she is perhaps an aspect of something within myself – but the poem wasn’t written about someone specific. It’s from a couple years ago, and I just rediscovered it in my files and thought I would share it.

I’m sorry I come off strong,
But I’ve been with you too long
to try to hide what I feel and shut my mouth.
I would agree to never see another snowflake
if only things would stay the same,
If only I’d be the only name in your mind
that brings memories of the kind of pleasure
you and I share.
I cannot imagine another life,
Not without your mind and body and soul.
My only goal, as of now,
is to make sure you don’t get tired of me,
that you keep on loving me,
that you won’t want to forsake me.
I wish I needed you like a fish needs a bicycle,
but it’s not true that I do,
And I don’t know how it ever could.
Scary? Oh, I know I am.
Am I in love? Very much so, thank you.
Sad? You have no idea.

Sticking With (Rather, Not.)

On this blog, I’ve posted many an excerpt. I’ve mostly posted short pieces – character studies, scenery descriptions, dialogue, short scenes that seem to need to belong to something longer, short stories, and a few beginnings to novels.

All this is great. It’s exactly why I started this blog – in order to try things out, try to figure out different genres and create different characters for myself to think over. I’ve practices my style, flow and different voices [at least, I hope I’ve managed to write in different voices].

But I’ve gotten addicted to having people read my work. I love posting on this blog and being able to get feedback on what I write. Why is this a problem? Well, in many ways, it isn’t. It’s good that I feel a connection and an obligation to be here, because it helps me sit my butt down and write most days.

The problem is that although I start many things, I haven’t finished a large percentage of them. Yes, I wrote a few complete short stories: The Princess Without a Name, One-Eyed Steve, Spam. But my longer works in progress always seem to shudder to a halt. I do have on fantasy novel [hopefully, eventually] that I’ve never posted anything from and probably never will, but other than that, I seem to get stuck. I don’t know if many of you remember my first attempt at a thriller, Move? Probably not. But I was so excited about it for so long, and then I just couldn’t think of anything more.

How do I dedicate the time to just one project, make it a commitment and try to finish it? Forget finish – how to I pass the fifteen page mark? I’ve written papers that were more than twenty pages long, so why do I get stuck with longer fiction? The irony is that I’m usually much more of a novel or novella girl – I enjoy short stories, but only really specific ones and only when I’m in a certain mood.

My whole goal in writing, besides the mere pleasure it brings me and the fact that now I’ve started I don’t ever want to stop, is to succeed in creating something that speaks to someone. Even just one person. When I daydream about being published one day (and I don’t allow myself to do this often, since it’s much too scary) I think about that one letter I’ll get, or that one email, from someone like me who just really enjoys reading and had fun reading something I wrote. That, for me, will be success right there. To make even one single person feel like I feel when I read novels or stories of any kind. That’s a bigger goal than I think it is, I’m sure, because all I ever hear are the horrors of publication, and I shouldn’t be striving for that in my writing anyway.

I should be striving to tell true things. Or have a basis of truth in what I write. I don’t mean that I should write an autobiography or base characters on real people – just that there should be some truth in the emotion and underlying tones of whatever I write.

This has turned into a much longer post than I intended. So I go back to my main question. How do you finish things? How do you just stick with something and finish it?

Dorothy

It’s a well known fact that if you drop a piece of buttered toast, it will land with the butter side down. Dorothy stared at her toast, lying there on her new, pristine white carpet and felt her world collapse around her. It had been one of those days, and her clumsiness at dropping the toast had been the last straw. If she could have seen her face in that moment, she would have been shocked, and maybe even annoyed. Her face had fallen, gone into a look of deep grief, and suddenly looked twenty years older.

She had to remind herself, every morning, that there were days like this. Days where everything went wrong and it felt as if every single mistake, misstep or blunder were the equivalent of accidentally setting off an atomic bomb.

Dorothy crumpled to the floor, and sat sobbing over her piece of toast. She knew she’d wake up fine the next morning. And she knew that her day, like every day, would end like this. Crying.

Boggle

Boggle is an under-appreciated game. Big Boggle even more so. You may be asking, what is this strange word? You may be asking, has she finally gone totally batty? Well, maybe not. Maybe it’s a really well known game and the only reason I’m not aware of that is because there wasn’t one [not even one!] set of Boggle at The Black Squirrel, which is the Sarah Lawrence student-run cafe.

Boggle, in case you don’t know, is a pretty simple game. There are sixteen six-sided dice, and there’s a sort of box thing that has little openings the size of those dice. And then there’s a cover. You shake it around until the dice fall into place, and then you see only one side of each of the dice, and those are the letters you get to work with.

You then need to try to write down all the words you can find in that little box of letters in front of you.

That was probably one of the worst explenations of Boggle ever written, but what can I say? I don’t remember how the rule-book words it.

The point is, it’s a fun game. It’s a wordy game. It’s a game I’m really good at. Scrabble? I’m okay. Quiddler? Well, both my brother and Sir B. F. beat me every single time. They have strategies, you see. If you haven’t heard of Quiddler, I highly recommend looking into it.

But Boggle – that’s a game that plays to my strengths. I write fast, I remember that words like “pot” and “tin” and “teem” can all be written backwards and mean something else, so I always get two words when I see these.

It might be possible, ever so slightly, to tell that it’s 1:24AM and I don’t have much to write about. I spent a half hour today starting to write something that Anne Lamott recommends doing in her amazing book, Bird by Bird. Anyone who wants to read a book about writing that’s both honest and hilarious should read it.

So now, without further babbling, rambling, chatting or similar, I bid you, good fellows or fellowettes, good night.

Eavesdropping

The owl sat on its regular midnight perch, on the beam that hung between the garage door and the overhanging roof. It was quite roomy there, and she liked having its nest so close by, in the very corner, where there was space right inside the corner of the roof.

She was just about to hoot softly and then fly out to catch little rodents by the tail when she was interrupted mid-hoot by a pair of loud voices that erupted in the middle of the driveway in front of her.

“You did NOT just say that!”

“What? You think you’re the only one allowed to be mean? I know how to be mean too, you know.”

“I’m not mean, you jerk-wad! How can you even say that to me?”

“‘Cause it’s true! You’re stuck up and mean, and you know what? I can stand it when you do it to me, but not when you start ragging on my best friends, too. They don’t get to see you like I do, so they don’t get that it’s just how you are.”

“Oh, what, so because they don’t get to see me naked then they don’t know the real me? Are you suggesting they all come over and we have a big party together?”

“WHAT? When did I ever say that? Where the hell is your head, Angela?”

“And what’s all this about you being okay with me being mean to you, anyway? I’m not mean to you!”

The owl in the eaves of the house cocked her head. The voices changed tones. The whiny, female-smelling one sounded muffled, and the deep-voiced male-smelling one made cooing noises that reminded the owl of the noises she made over her eggs.

“I love you, but don’t you see that you’re going to isolate me from everyone else if you keep behaving like a stuck up bitch with them? I’m not saying you ARE one. I’m just saying you act like it, honey.”

“B-b-but your friends make me nervous, and ever since we moved to this stupid city it’s been all about your friends, and don’t you think I miss mine to bits? It’s not like you were super nice to them or anything…”

“I made an effort and you know it. It was hard when they kept sizing me up with their eyes, checking if I was hot enough for they angelic Angela.”

“Well, they were protective of me. What can I do? All your friends want to do is talk to you. It’s like I’m just a painting on the wall in the room. They stare at me sometimes and then go right back to talking to you about the Diamondbacks or the Razorbacks or whatever that team is called.”

“If you stopped acting like an ice princess, and if you stopped being so cold, maybe they’ll be nicer to you, hmm? They don’t always talk about sports, you know.”

The owl, getting bored with the human jabber and the ensuing wet noises as they did that strange thing humans do with their mouths, decided to get going. She spread her wings and leaped from the eaves, wings spreading out to her sides. She dove and then flew upwards, scanning the neighborhood for some delicious little critters to snap in her beak.

“Wow, did you see that?”

“An owl! I’ve never seen one before! Oh my gosh, that’s amazing!”

“What a beauty, hmm?”

“Yeah, so beautiful…”

Lost

Sometimes, I get lost.

Lost in a sea of emotions. But they’re confusing. They come from everywhere and nowhere. They come from the sky’s particular tinge of blue that reminds me of a childhood, a true childhood, that’s been gone for longer than it should be. They come from some mysterious place within the tightness in my chest, grounding themselves with no explanation as to why they’re there.

Sometimes, I get lost.

Lost in an ocean of thoughts. My mind is like some sort of quantum machine, managing to be in all different lines of thought at the same time. Only when I choose to look at a particular theme does it become stark black ink against the backdrop of grey matter swirling in my mind. But when that happens, the thoughts become slow, strange, so sharply focused that it hurts to look at them. So I let them go back into the maelstrom, and I stop concentrating.

Sometimes, I get lost.

Lost in a wave of delirious physicality. Walking, dancing, making contact – they all take on such an incredible appeal, pump such strong streams of endorphin into my brain that I become more acutely aware of my heart pumping, my muscles working, my sweat dripping. When I’m inside the movement, I feel close to some sort of essence of the body. After a while, I get the feeling that I’m no longer in control. I have to keep walking, I must keep dancing, I really can’t bear to end the hug.

Sometimes, I get lost.

Lost in words.

Stories

We’re all made of stories.

We’re all living stories.

We’re all making stories.

Everything in our lives can be seen as a story. There’s the story about how you were born, the story of whose braid you pulled in first grade, and when you got braces, and why you chose to take physics in high-school and where you had your first kiss.

We all tell stories every day. There’s the story you tell your best friend about how your date went last night, the story you tell your aunt about whose car you dented last week, and the one you tell your coworker about when the boss got drunk at the office party, and the one you tell your cat about why you’re giving him canned food instead of dry today, and the one you tell yourself about where you wish you were right now.

We all make up stories all the time, too. There’s the story of how you wish your father was alive, the story of whose life you’d want to try out for a day, and the story of when you’ll really feel like a grown-up for sure, and why you’re going to win the lottery next time and where you can picture yourself living in ten years.

But then, there are the missing stories.

The stories of horrible events that need to be suppressed.

The stories that you’ll never know, because there’s no one who can tell them to you.

The stories that will never be, because they’re too frightening to really accept.

Even then, though – there are stories. Every minute of every day of your life. They are stories.