The Curiosity of Prose
The most curious thing of all was that L always seemed to write when feeling contrary. This bothered her.
If there were things to cement in space and time – the space being the white space here, the time being the future, when she would look back on the words of her past to read herself like a book – should they not be all the wonderful, marvelous, butterfly-fluttering things she felt about herself some of the times, mostly during the spring?
Maybe I shouldn’t write in winter, she thought. In winter, writing became a thing to produce a bit of heat from kinetic energy. Typing madly, furiously, to generate warmth. Everything had to come out – for survival, of course.
But winter writing always made her depleted. She couldn’t shake the feeling of her worst enemy bearing down her back, following on her heels, that large shadow of a beast: Boredom. The sky was darkening around her and she knew it was him, Boredom, sneaking in and around the edges of her life.
At least heartbreak was something to dig into. Anger too; anger was fun to play with, see where it would stick, how you could shake it, use it, save a bit of it for a rainy day when you really needed to scream at the fucking car that just splashed you, goddamnit.
Boredom made her into mush. Boxed mashed potato mush.
In any case, the city of Boston was there, outside her window, the backdrop to her story – but the story was what? What type of story was she in? She couldn’t tell anymore. Graphic novel? Definitely not. For a while, it felt like something you’d find taking up a full shelf in the Young Adult section. A series where each cover is a different color and shows only a sliver of her body; her mouth; a thigh, perhaps. But at 28, she simply couldn’t be starring in a YA novel. She decided to give herself more credit than that.
There was one month that felt like romance. The holidays and bourbon certainly have a way of warming one’s heart. Oh, and it would have been the trashy kind of romance, too – rope and candle wax displayed unapologetically on the cover. A shard of moonlight illuminating sweaty bodies entangled in a dark hotel room. Lots of words like “throbbing” and “swollen” and “gaze” and “yearning.” Potentially even the phrase, “Obeying an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed.” Or better yet, “Love’s sweet lava flowed.”
But there she was, in snow-covered Boston, and the only things flowing were slush down the street, people out of the subway, and piss down the telephone poles.
Maybe L was in a satire. The world certainly had become something worthy of a good humorous critique. So unbelievable was what was taking place that life itself seemed a satire – an absurd mockery of something deranged and unhinged from reality. But in this world, would she be the writer or subject? Because if she were the subject of a satire, that would mean it was she who was the mockery. And with satire generally being a dark genre – what a sad mockery she would be.
No, she thought. That was all wrong.
Truly, the way she viewed her life was through the lilt of poetry. Words cradling love and fear and hopes in their sinewy formations; stringy and tough and dependable are words. She could always place her dreams there.
L would need to determine two things: was she writing her own story, or was one being written about her? Was she to be featured in first, second, or third person? If it weren’t to be in first, who then would be writing it? If she truly wanted the novel of her life to feel as fabulous as she desired, she would first need to find a suitable author.
I wonder where she might find one of those.
