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| I Want to Write MagicI write only when I'm melancholy
It's weird because I
Want to write beautiful.
I want to write magic
I want to
And that's the end of the ideas.
I can't build characters
I can't follow through on a plot line.
I have no idea how to show and tell
Truth
And I hate postmodernism.
If I could,
I would paint a picture of this stormy sunset,
I'd explain the way that the clouds had
Swirled together and apart,
With fourteen shades of colour in between gray and dark gray
Slowly shifting shapes,
billowing into plums and roses
Coming together to smother the last lingering rays of the peach sun
Against the melodramatic backdrop
Of mountain peaks rising out of this 101 mile lake,
And how being a part of this natural beauty makes me
Feel something real, outside of anger and sadness and just plain
Blah.
But I only write when I'm melancholy,
so I won't even try.
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| Fairy TalesIt looked like the light
Filtering through the rustling curtains
Was dancing
And I wanted to describe it as
A million little fairies
Teetering on their tip toes
Swirling and whirling in petite pirouettes,
But I knew you wouldn't let me.
You'd call me silly, and melodramatic, and fanciful
And you wouldn't even try
To see the magic that was
Sparkling
On our dusty hardwood floor
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| I'm lost amidst the rubble of someone elses life. | | |
| Sometimes, when I look back on the work that I have done, I am confused at where it came from. When I used to write papers, I swear to god that they were written through me. I simply tried to absorb a liquid amount of information, then understand. I'd underline things, and write in different coloured pens and pencils - all over the pages of the books that I was reading, then put multi-coloured post-its everywhere important. I think that I sort of memorized the pattern, then combined it with the patterns in other places, sat on my bed surrounded by books and notes, and started to pull it all together.
I understand that in the olden days, women used to weave. I remember it especially, because one of my favorite authors used to put magic carpets and women of the loom in his stories. Well, sometimes I think that writing is sort of like that magical craft. Like I pull ideas out of everywhere around me, then simply put them together in a slightly altered form, a different order, and with a different tone - my own. But at the end, I can never comprehend that I was the person that put those thoughts in that order.
But now, when I look back on my writing, I'm somewhat awed at what's in front of me. Is this my voice, or is it simply something that comes through me? I don't think that I am the same person from one moment to the next, so I can never truly understand the person writing the stories in front of me - and I never know where I want them to go.
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| whispersI remember sitting in the passenger seat of my dad's new Jeep Grande Cherokee. The grey leather was just beginning to heat up, and I held my cheek in the palm of my hand, my face close to the window - although I was careful not to touch the glass. My dad's side of the family never liked it when you left a mark.
I read a lot as a little girl. Sometimes it seemed like I had read so many books that every little part of me was made up of text from the stories that floated me through my days, like my hands weren't real, but were made up of filamental figments of the thoughts of something much more complex than me. I think that's when I first knew that I was hardly more than the character in someone's story.
So, the first time that I tried to explain it to someone, I was sitting in the passenger seat of my dad's brand new Jeep Grande Cherokee, loving the feeling of seats that heat the car from the leather outward, and staring out the window. I started to feel like I was dreaming and I was nothing more than words in the mouth of a story teller, a solid person created merely from the whisps of someone's dream - made real through fingers flying over a keyboard, and chicken scratch on cocktail napkins.
Understand that it's not that I was confused by reality, it's just that I knew that the reality that I was experiencing was no more valid that than the reality that I was imagining. I started to question whether this life was really my own, or if it belonged to the person who was telling it.
My dad was a smoker, and I used to get carsick in smoky vehicles, so even though it was probably minus forty (where I grew up, minus forty is more than a temperature - it's a state of mind, everthing takes a little bit longer to achieve, and you're always tense with the cold), and I had rolled the window down just until I could curl my mittened fingers around the top edge and feel the outside. Something about that slightly opened window struck me that day, and I remember bursting out of my reverie by blurting out to my dad:
"Have you ever thought of the possibility that we're all just characters in a book and nothing is actually happening and it won't happen because we aren't really real, and it's almost impossible to get out?" He just looked at me blankly, with his mustache highliting his upper lip and his eyebrows slightly raised. So I continued. "I mean, don't you think that it's possible that we are just words on a page? That something is writing us, and someone is reading us, and that any decisions that we think we're consciously making are really just author choices? And that, maybe if we tried hard enough we could reach out of the turning pages like I can reach out of this window that's separating our bubble of warmth from the cold outside?" Even though I was just a kid, I was given to long monologues - my mom says that she always thought of me as Pebbles from The Flinstones, because even before I could properly form sensible words I was sitting in the carseat in the back of our mini-van jabbering in gibberish. I had an active mind, I guess.
Anyway, after I had explained myself to my dad, he just looked at me like I was Pebbles again, and answered me with what was to become one of his favorite dismissals (along with "For a smart girl, you sure act stupid." and "Make a budget.") and stated that he "just wasn't deep enough for me." | | |
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