The Gods…

They give so much credence to the existence of choice.

Perhaps they know to believe in the unpredictability of events is to be false, but perhaps they find the pretense of ignorance to be far more convenient. It allows them to flaunt their fallibility while still collecting the accolades of their admirers who live a ways down the road. Few of them, however, can hide from the scrutiny of each other. And when the three old sisters from Rowan County invite themselves for the occasional afternoon tea, none of them can deny themselves any longer. When the sober truth of their own natures is woven into a nicely-patterned shawl draped over hunched ancient shoulders, it reminds them how little control they actually wield in the scheme of things.

White China

She was a fragile thing, a fine white china plate covered in delicate cracks – the kind of plate that looked perfect on the shelf with her polite smile and soft hair. But holding her in your hands, you felt the seams in her façade, tense to the point of snapping into many beautiful porcelain pieces if you exerted just the right amount of pressure.

When I met her, she immediately stirred within me an inevitable hero complex. I diagnosed her condition as a fear of intimacy springing from an unknown past and from this, I was determined to save her from the inner warring forces which kept her rooted in the familiar and threatened to rip her tightly wound psyche apart.

Her salvation began with a simple touch of the hands at the kitchen table, a gesture which elicited a surprised and terrified squeal. Much later, it progressed to the wrapping of my arms around her tightly hunched shoulders as she fought the shivers running through her skin. Then it was a bare kiss on her cheek, followed by a tentative one on the lips. Eventually, I was able to fit our bodies together like two mismatched puzzle pieces in a small bed padded by old blankets. She never reached out, never came willingly, but that was always an acceptable truth to me in my experimentations.

Then, we found ourselves in the bathtub. Together we sat, listening to the splashes of water against the tile and the forced sound of our own quiet breathing. She put her head on my shoulder, focusing on the white tiles to ground herself in something more solid than our two bodies. She swallowed thickly. Her heart beat furiously along, ignoring the steady guidance of my own against her back. It pounded wildly and quickly in her chest, faster and faster and heavier and heavier, as a young rabbit in the grip of absolute panic. I heard its frantic drumming echoing against the walls and in my ears, rippling the water around us in an indistinguishable pattern. To touch her was to feel as if something was rattling on her bones in hopes of escape, beating and demanding attention so adamantly that I could no longer distinguish between the individual beats.

And suddenly it stopped.

She sighed one last time and closed her eyes as if in sleep. The water droplets lingering on her skin grew cold in the air. Around me it was silent and blissfully still.

At last. She was finally free, and my job was done.

There tends to be lots of thinking on long car trips.

I spent many hours driving this weekend, listening to one song on repeat as my thoughts attempted to take shape into something like eloquence. Night driving sends me into a singular focus: as the reds and yellows of the sunlight deepen into blue and then to black, what I can see narrows to the repetitive streaks of white that keep me on my path, the dark outline of trees rising on my left and right, the occasional pair of headlights coming and going on their own journey. I feel so alone. It’s quite comforting, this rare stretch of time where I don’t talk to anyone, where I’m just listening and letting the music blasting from the radio inform the tone of my thoughts.

I had to go back to my outline last night. The plot changed somewhere along my journey into something more satisfying on a character level. I still don’t know exactly where it will end, but I’m tempted to leave it alone for now and see where the story takes me. Once I get to that point, I mean. It’s somewhere in the indeterminate future of this writing process I’m on. I’ve barely left the gate (although the horse race analogy I was envisioning in that sentence doesn’t necessarily make much sense for such a solitary undertaking).

But for those interested, by the end of this week I hope to have a little part of the beginning polished for consumption, though I can’t guarantee it will be lengthy. I can only use my boyfriend as a sounding board so much before I have to just put it out there for someone less biased to see. We’ll see how it goes…

She covered herself with night

and drifted through the house on soundless feet. She went through all the rooms and in the dark her presence echoed against the floor and the walls and the ceilings as if they were all blank and empty. She danced naked in front of the windows and no one stopped to watch her because they were all asleep and thinking of nothing. She talked to someone who wasn’t there in the sitting room where all sorts of formal conversations took place, saying things she had never said aloud before. She pulled the sheets from her bed and stalked the shadows in makeshift garb, a pretty young thing whose veneer of strong calm had cracked and who was afraid to admit she could be anything less than composed. She hid away her memories in a box and burned them in the bathtub and washed the ashes down the drain. She collapsed on the stairs and sobbed for an uncountable number of minutes and the house in shades of blue wept with her.

When the sun came up the next morning she stood in the kitchen with a smile on her face.

(Inspired by this song.)

On the Writing Journal

I have the habit of writing ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ letters in the journals I keep, as if they were acquaintances who turn into close friends and not inanimate objects I project myself onto. I don’t really know of any other way to begin and end the time I’ve spent with a journal; it only seems fair to acknowledge the sacrifice it has made for the sake of my art and my personal intimacies. Over the time I keep it, it becomes part of me, like an extra limb or an extension of my mind. I feel the least I can do is recognize it for what it evolves into, an imprint of me as I was for an unspecified duration of time.

Perhaps that is why I continue to write everything down first rather than adapt to the easy convenience of the keyboard. I let my wrist cramp, my right middle finger grow its callous, and my fingernails impress painfully on my palm for the (perhaps pretentious) belief that this way is more honest, more pure. Physically writing feels more personal to me, a hybrid of my pre-adolescent habit of diary-keeping and the day-to-day snatches of plot that fill my head up now. What is written out on the page becomes permanent, unobliterated by cursor or slash marks or sheer will of mind. For better or worse, it’s there, a reference for a future self to steal from or ignore. I can choose to look at it again, recall the moment, the context, the feeling. Despite the vagueries, so much can be gleaned or remembered from a select word or phrase which otherwise seems obscure to those who lack context. For that, I so relish having the choice to keep my journals shut against time and eye.

Or, I could open them up again after a while and take on the role of the “objective” reader. The process, the development of the art, is the part I love best. The spontaneity of writing in the moment, the transcription into another medium, the rearranging and deletion and addition of words and phrases to craft the ideal written image. The determination of what is good and what is not, what is worth sharing and what to never allow past the first draft. This power is why I continue to fill up journals and let them accumulate on the bookshelf as if I, the private and secretive author, deserve my place among the public literature.

It’s my ego, hidden away on pages of books that no one will read.