Chris’ Writing – Page 16

When do we become content?

I have this idea of an old man stopping by a coffee shop window and looking in on youth on the inside. He’s cold and shivering because his coat is too thin and his blood doesn’t run fast enough. He’s slowing down, but won’t go inside to warm his chill. Instead, he tolerates the cold.

There is a beautiful girl with smooth skin on the inside. She whispers, “Hello, Sir.”

They never meet. He smiles back, maybe.

There’s youth and age. There’s warmth and cold. There’s a clear window pane that divides the two. But, what is between them other than years?

When did he become content? When does she stop wanting?

Degenerate

We let our guard down and look around wide-eyed and wondering what’s going to get us in the degenerate darkness that we find ourselves stumbling around in. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. Different and distant from what we’ve experienced before. The minutes race by as we look at and past each other and wonder why we ended up where we did.

—

Sit down. Silence. Listen to what the speaker has to say. Those were the rules when I went to church. You could say those were my intentions, as well, for five minutes of the sermon. But inevitably, my thoughts degenerated to musings less pure than the worship of His Holiness. As my pencil drew spirals on the timeline, I closed my eyes and tried to think of the color black. Memory Flashes. Memory frozen. Memory frames.

—

“I want to degenerate you,” he said.

“What does that even mean?” she said.

“Ha.”

“Shut up. You’re being stupid.”

—

Degenerate. Corrupt. Impure. Debased. Degraded. Vitiated.

I’ve never known anything to be absolutely free of these.

Pure. I guess it’s always associated with white. With this innocent glow that knows nothing, but isn’t it easier to conceal and overlook in darkness? I would rather hide in a black room than a white one. In a dark one, not a light one. That’s where I would go. What I would think if I wanted to get away.

—

This man had two hearts and one big smile. At parties his friends would often joke with him about the extra heart. They told him he was a nice guy. That he could love more. That he could run faster than Secretariat. He smiled at these prods, which he had endured for a decade now, and always responded by saying he was waiting to meet the right woman. Then he’d give her his heart. Or both his hearts. He hadn’t really figured out how this joke worked, but he chuckled and everyone around him laughed because they were drunk and the barrier to laughter had long since degenerated.

Writing Notes

Tell me a story about perspective…

Lost Boy

He had set out on his own for a year, as a self imposed right of passage.

He’s sitting at a cafe with a stranger girl talking about his take on the world.

He’s feeling relatively lost and uninspired.

She’s smiling at him telling him he’s lucky to know that feeling. But, that he’s probably headed in the wrong direction. We get the sense that the girl has been there before.

—

“That’s sweet, you’re a lost boy,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You’re not the first I’ve talked to. The first guy looking to find inspiration by driving west.”

Writing Notes

I’ve had writer’s block for two days now, and I hate it. I even wrote a neat little simile about writer’s block last night that involved tea-kwon-do and using your attacker’s strength to your advantage. But, as you can imagine it was a horrible attempt at paralleling martial arts with my approach to writing.

I’ve been bothered a lot by the fact that I’ve never really written fiction. In most of my stories the physical details are fictional, but the emotional core is something very real. I’m between thinking this is how you write good fiction and this is how you write bad non-fiction. I want the writing to be authentic and I want to be able to relate to it, and I have nothing wrong with bringing in my own experiences. There’s no better way to write a compelling story with believable details. But, I’m having difficulty distancing myself from my characters and often, they come off as idealistic figures of loneliness or loss or whatever my emotion of the day is. They aren’t flawed and they have no humor. They are one dimensional and because of this, I get stuck at one page of writing.

My goal for the coming week is to write two 1500 word stories that involve three central characters in crowded settings. This is partially in response to Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” which is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read. It is simply told, but leaves you with much to think about.

Drag Racing

The high school parking lot is dark and empty. The faded lines that define the spaces during weekdays create lanes the length of the lot that we are racing down as fast as we can in a Jimmy and a Jeep. The fear of getting caught is too far behind to enter our mind.Alice is in the back seat of my Jimmy holding on tight and talking – always talking on her cell phone. Her bright blond hair shines against a black t-shirt that reads “Metallica” in bold silver letters across her breasts. I look away from the pavement ahead and into the rearview mirror. Alice sneers when I catch her eye then blows me a kiss. The air in the car sits low like a heavy fog and smells like cotton blossom body wash and cigarette smoke. I inhale deeply through my nose and exhale through my mouth as the adrenalin pulses down my spine. The engine whines as the car nears eighty-five miles per hour.

At full speed Bob’s jeep looks like an autonomous red blur rolling on black spheres. Even during the day he is invisible behind dark tinted windows, and now he is just a lurking shadow ahead and to the right.

There isn’t much to this race, beyond the girl in my back seat. She was the fixation of his adolescent dreams and is now the source of our silent animosity. She is also my girlfriend because I was too arrogant to know the rules. To care.

Bob doesn’t talk to me anymore, and it is irony, perhaps, that we are racing each other tonight. As if racing cars in the darkness of nowhere will settle something. Damn it, it’s just a girlfriend. Is that really going to wreck our friendship? It was more than that. I knew that. But staring ahead into the open lot and knowing there was a lost friend racing next to me exaggerated the void.

It was over before it started.

Summer Swim

7am – the alarm goes off. Buzzing. Not music. Music never worked for me. Not since I started waking up on my own. The covers are off and I pull on my swimsuit in seconds. It’s a summer morning and I’m going swimming. No shower. Showers don’t work in the summer because the bathroom gets hot. The water fluctuates and then I’m tense before 8am. Not good.I bike to the lake, only a quarter mile away. My towel is around my neck keeping my bare chest warm. I take the easy route, down the hill to the left of my driveway and bank hard around the right hand turn. The wind feels fresh on my face. Most of the neighbors aren’t out yet. They’re still sleeping or drinking coffee in their kitchen alcoves. I don’t know. Their sprinklers are on.

The sand is cold. The water is still until I step into the waters edge and watch ripples radiate out towards the rising sun. There’s an orange glow that softens to yellow as it rises into the scattered clouds. There is a silhouette of a sailboat to my left. It is still. Gray. Taller and perpendicular to the horizon. It’s the left margin of my morning. To the right is a dock. Part old and part new. This is easy to tell. The new wood is yellow. The old, gray.

I’m only testing the water. I don’t walk in. I jump. I walk out the dock stepping around seagull droppings and holes large enough to catch my large toes. The dock sways a little – like I’m on a boat. I find the spot where I hid shampoo on a shelf under the dock and drop my towel.

The morning sounds have been limited. An alarm. Air racing by on my bike ride. A car driving by above the beach. The crunch of rocks under my feet. The creaking of the dock.

A splash.

A gasp.

Untitled Poem

I have lost a lot of love.
I have let it slip away. I have thrown it down.
In anger;
In fear;
In disgust.
I have spilled love like a kicked-over soft drink on a linoleum floor.
In that case,
I watched it spread
Until all that was left
Was a thin brown sticky film that made a nasty noise when passers-by stepped on it.

I have lost a lot of love.
I have written it down in blue ink on yellow paper.
I tore that up.
I have typed it out in the dark.
I deleted that.
I have scratched it in the sand.
That is gone, too.

I have lost a lot of love,
But I am not lost Because . . .
No matter.
Love is always.