Tag: Chris’ Writing

For Whom I Write

Hemingway said once:

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful; Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.

I agree with this even if I don’t know who I love at the time or if I feel that no one is currently in love with me. If I am writing there must be someone out there who either loves me for what I write or loves the simple fact that I write.

If I’m not writing for someone else – someone who loves me – then I am writing for myself. I am usually trying to perfect some distant memory or mash together what’s left over of my past to make sense of it. When I look back at my life most things that seemed complicated at the time are now decidedly straightforward – the slow fade of life. There is always more than I remember. The “more” is what I satisfy with my writing. Whether it is exact, perfect, non-fiction, or the exact opposite doesn’t matter. What matters is what I want to remember and how I choose to share it.

So, yeah. I can agree with Hemingway. I write to perfect my life. I write for the woman I love. I may even be writing or you.

Yellow Line Two

A thin yellow light dissected the hotel room where Will and Sarah slept in a mess of cheap white sheets. The digital clock on the bedside table glowed bright green in Will’s cloudy eyes. He reached to snooze and hit volume, causing the harsh buzz to blare and startle Sarah. She jerked her head off the pillow and said, “Turn it off.”

Five minutes later it went off again, waking them from the deep after-sleep that would be the last comfort of their day. Sarah was up and out of bed in seconds, naked and cold. She glanced in the large mirror on the wall at the foot of the bed as she walked by to see that she was the same outline as the day before. Her hair fell down to the middle of her back and over her shoulders. She had vacant light blue eyes that set heavy upon their chosen subject. Her cheeks, ribs and hipbones were like jagged rocks protruding from a calm ocean, moving harshly under her taught skin.

She reached into her purse on the dresser and fished around for cigarettes. “Where are the smokes?” she asked. Will moaned. “What the f–k. Where are they?”

“Last night, I don’t know. They’re probably in the shower.”

Sarah walked to the bathroom and caught herself in the mirror. Again. The fluorescent light was harsh and unflattering. Will saw her pause.

Yellow Line One

Gone broke in my car and got nothin’ to listen to. I’m bored with two hours down and twenty to go on a plain old worn down road with a bump in the middle and no yellow line. The dust blows if I roll down the window, and my back sweats a sweaty hole in my seat if I roll it up. Doesn’t even seem like AC’s been invented yet with this old beater I’m rollin’ around in. It’s breathin’ too damn hard to worry about something so sophisticated as conditioning of the air.

I squint ahead to see what I can see, and what I see is mostly a light gray line splitting two green fields and a stray black and white dairy cow mooing on the left. No big red barn ’cause that’d be asking too much of this dust bowl landscape I, for some reason, chose to cross in the July heat. That’s a July heat with an emphasis on the Jew, like you hear people say in movies about southerners. I’ve never met a true southerner with a true accent, so I guess I’m just speculating my memory on a motion picture. But that’s the best I got, and if you were here you’d get that I gotta speculate on anything I can to keep on the pencil line-road.

In Her Eyes

He stood, half seated on the antique writing table in the hallway. His stomach lurched. She turned off the hallway light. He surrendered to the darkness and slipped further down the front of the table until he was seated on the floor with his head on his knees. The weight of his error pinned him to this moment. He looked up again in her direction like knowing prey anticipating the first strike of its attacker. But there was nothing coming. Through the darkness there was only the blackness of her eye sockets, highlighted below by her cheekbones.

He looked through his tears and said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

Anger overtook him and he thrust his elbows into the weak old wood of the table until it began to crack. The lamp that sat atop the table fell and shattered on the floor. Glass scattered around him. He pumped forward and back again with so much force that his body was kicked away. Laying in glass, elbows bleeding, he screamed and pounded his fists until the pain absolved his lack of control.

There was a sincerity to her existence in his life that he desperately wanted to understand. But could not. She loved him and did not lie when she told him so. He could not stretch far enough through the darkness to reach her. Even if he was seated beside her, their arms entangled, looking into her cold blue eyes his empathy for her love would be insufficient. The fact that he could not try hard enough to make successful something that was not meant to succeed infuriated him.

Written from 2:15 am to 2:35 am in my bedroom in Traverse City, MI.