First Impressions,

Chapter One, First Impressions

Killing my mother was easy.

Alright, so that first line has nothing to do with anything. I just remember my AP lit teacher bringing it up as one of those “amazingly inventive opening lines” of some book. She’s always talking about the creative genius, how one really awesome first line of a book can change the way someone reads it. It can determine the entire course of how someone reads a novel. Determine the path that those pages take. Determine how history remembers it.

That’s a lot of pressure on (at average) seven words.

Besides, have you ever tried writing a really cool, really original first line? It’s nearly impossible to think of something extremely outrageous yet insightful at the same time; make up something that both grabs attention for being outlandish, yet manages to relate perfectly to everything else you write. Composing the actual prose of the novel is tough enough, must we really experience the stress of having to produce a perfectly wry, ironic, thought provoking, hilarious first sentence?

I don’t think so.

Anyway, who doesn’t want to kill their mother? I can imagine it, and it really is quite easy in my daydreams. A simply bendy-straw to the eye would do the trick. (Hey, wait a sec, that sounds like a pretty good first line. Hm….) Then again, I try to think who would wake me up in time to get to school. And drive me to the bus stop. Dad is always out the door an hour before I even deign to open my eyes.

The only reason I keep her alive is to be an alarm clock, I suppose.

What’s the point of these ramblings? Trust me, I’m asking myself the same thing. Posterity’s sake? A pressure release valve? The simple fact that placing fingers to keys and making sentences appears is fun and fulfilling? Who knows? More importantly, who cares? I’m writing. You’re reading. I have to say that sounds like a pretty good relationship to me.

It’s not like I usually have coherent thought process. If I wanted to make some sort of intricate world, with clues and foreshadowing planted like seeds in the first chapter to be carefully cultivated until their reveal in chapter twenty-nine… I would have gone with third-person narration.

My life isn’t really like that. I don’t see the foreshadowing when it first occurs. It’s more like… life is a revolving door that I thought swings on hinges. You don’t realize you’re going nowhere until you try to turn around and get smacked in the face by a pane of glass shoved by some very large, very irritable woman with a very damn small pocketbook.

I go shopping a lot. And I still hate those frigging doors.

Anyway, as I was saying, my life doesn’t work like some carefully placed novel. I’ve missed the bus before while listening to my iPod. I don’t look “cute” or “endearing” when I don’t comb my hair or trip and fall in the cafeteria. I’m not a waif-thin pretty girl who, for some unknown reason, is deemed a “loser” and can’t get dates, even though she’s altogether nicer and cuter than the popular girl. That’s bullshit. If I was thin and cute and shy and endearing, I would have guys lined up at my desk.

Above all, I don’t have some secret, tortured past that makes me withdrawn and alluring. Yes, I was teased in middle school (but, god damn it, who wasn’t?), and yes, I have been sad before. But, Christ sake, if I was to shut down and move to the emo corner every time I remember a twelve-year-old boy making yet another “boob joke” I might as well be Bella Swan (ah, that one made me laugh a bit)!

I always really loved words, though. Not as much lately, because my attention span is five times shorter than it used to be (thank you, internet). Plus, combined with the fact that, once I reached high school, I’ve only read two comedies (both Shakespearean, by the way), reading became a bit… depressing. I mean, I still love it, but isn’t it nice to sit back on the couch and laugh your ass off for half an hour instead of trudging through Anna Karenina’s self-destructive, psychopathic, train -hating rampage?

I hope you concur with me. Unless you’re one of those sick emo-posers who drawn scars on their wrist with red ink and wanes poetically. I like my good chunk of angst as much as the next fangirl, but seriously? These people have nothing to complain about. So I tune them out, and instead, write lines of silly verse in the margins of my notebook, or continue the incredible works of masters, or simply reflect on life.

It is always a joy to me to sit and think and create words and shapes and colors. I know so many people who look down on writing, who say it won’t help the world at large. Who say it’s not practical. Who say it’s not stupid. It’s comments like those that make me cry (and that’s really hard to do. Seriously). It’s comments like those that lead to the Dark ages.

Those who don’t see the value and beauty of writing have never learned history. The swords may have fought the crusades, but the words began it. John F. Kennedy incited the fires in the hearts of a nation with his prose. Martin Luther King Jr. tore down walls, while Winston Churchill built them. Orwell protested the government, and the government has protested countless others. Lincoln was a politician with them, Malcolm X a rebel. God led his people out of the desert, Buddha calmed the mind, Vishnu destroyed, Muhammad enlightened.

When pen meets paper, something incredible happens. Something transient and desperate and loving and hating happens.

Life happens on that paper.

And then paper meets voice, and things change.

And soon a man is on the moon, and people have a dream, and rebels find their cause.

All because of the words.

Maybe I’ll never achieve that level of greatness. Maybe no one will ever get chills when they witness my words. But they are mine. A soul fragment on a blank eight and a half by eleven sheet, with nothing in the way of my innermost thoughts except the great white chasm of indecision and the accursed writers’ block. And procrastination, lots of that. Laziness is a key factor.

The point is... well… I sort of lost track of myself. What were we talking about again?

That’s how it goes, I guess.

Maybe I’ll use these pages to find myself. Or lose myself. Or make a new self. All of the above are pretty much acceptable, I suppose. It’s my supposed life anyway, I’ll do what I want with it. And that includes shoe-shopping. Which is sort of what I rather be doing right now, in all honesty. You would too, if you saw my closet. You might even give me the money.

I think writing a great closing line is even harder than conjuring up that fantastic opening line. You have all these thoughts and ramblings bouncing around on the page, and you need to tie everything together. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. No schematics to follow. You simply need to find some way to incorporate the kick-ass opener, your sub-par body and your strange and random title that leaves people wondering if you thought of it on purpose or not. It’s like the theater of the absurd, right there on three Microsoft word single-spaced pages.

So I suppose that, if I’m following the guidelines of life, that are as random and out of place as myself, it doesn’t really matter how end it, does it? Perhaps, if it’s so far out there, so weird and exciting and indecipherable, English classes will search for its meaning fifty years in the future. So I’ll just use that first line again and act cryptic, and keep this secret between you and me.

Killing my mother was easy.

A/N: It's a Halloween experiemtn gone wrong! I've risen form the dead! I hunger for brains! (alright, but only the white chocolate ones my psych teacher gave out on Thursday mmmmmmmm).

Unedited, raw, IN YOUR FACE, for NaNoWriMo 2009. =)