Author has written 4 stories for Life, General, and Fantasy. I carry around a journal and a black pen because I write in fragments, scribbling stories, descriptions, lists, quotes, musings, and overheard conversations onto lined pages with the uniformity of a typewriter.
I have never finished a story--only written an ending.
I will scatter my life before you like shards of broken glass, that is all it is anyway. And you don't need to see the whole picture:
The long, dry hands of expectation pull me out of bed each morning, gently cradle my head, and toss me down the hall. I'm up without thinking, up before I can wonder why.
The girl holds a white, plastic shovel to her forehead with her left hand and clutches a toy spoon/fork combination in the other. She peers over the couch, spying on the enemy base where the evil Dr. Buzzsaw (A Buzz Lightyear) lords over a collection of tools on the pretend workbench. Shovel Girl approaches cautiously.
She clenched her mouth shut to hold back the sobs, forcing them into her chest and head. Occasionally, a strangled breath would break past her lips and shudder painfully out of her body.
I pretend to be a writer. My shelves and folders are filled with notebooks and papers, but every last one of them is blank which is alright because no one has ever opened them to check. They look full and important. They are pretending to be novels.
They always thought she was angry when she paused to consider her words in those inevitable breaks in conversation. Her brow would furrow--at 18 she already had a deep line in her forehead--and her lips would press together in a classic pout of displeasure, leaving the poor soul across from her to wonder what in the world had gone wrong.
She found it amusing to slip "Death in Yellowstone" between two books promising an enriched life.
Tomorrow, movers will come and pack up my life into neat brown boxes so that each moment and memory will look like the next, and the movers, as the dispassionate judges of my acclomplishments, will be able to give me an empty number, and I will know what my life is worth.
I pretend to be someone else so often that perhaps someone else is me. |
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