Wanting to Write, Needing to be Real
[I think I enjoy reading honest rambling more than well-composed fiction, so here I am. There are metaphors below, but no lies (and, of course, no perfect truths).]
Is rhyme or rhythm worth it? Do you mind if I give it to you monotone? Is it true that the words I choose are from one of only two options, offering my heart or averting my gaze? Be concise. Be clear, but consider that ambiguity is the source of inspiration. I remember seeing a shape in the drywall and mistaking it for something startling. Isn't that like tripping on treasure? I want to fall backwards into an endless expanse of grey cloud and look through the myriad shapes. I think I would free fall until I was one with the first question. Then I could cut a swath through the ether with my hand, turning grey into black and white, dividing night and day. The fact is I tried it, I tried stepping off the precipice into the unknown. It did not disprove my theories, but it was absolutely horrible. It was an intensely anxious experience. I tried to quiet my mind through my breathing and through logical arguments that I was okay, but it was like trying to pin down something very slippery and I did not have the strength of focus to hold it down. I heard someone quote in an interview some dead guy who promised something like "jump down into the uncertain and you will find that is a feather bed." I was like that dead guy once, and I can see where he was coming from. I did jump though, and the fall is terrifying, completely heart-seizing, and what is most damning is that the same part of me that came up with the idea, the part that thought up all my best thoughts, spoke through the screaming that this was not the answer. It was not the answer. However, none of the a priori reasoning is rejected. If you fall long enough, maybe there is a feather bed. It is still quite possible that there is enlightenment in the grey. Realize though, like I did so painfully, that the understanding you would gain would have to be a product of ferocious necessity. There is no calm absorption of raw creation. There is only fear of the unknown. You are helpless against your fear of the unknown. You are tearing frantically at the clouds, reaching for something to hold onto with a desperation that does not fade. That is why you find a solution. If the spirit cannot die, then by function of necessity and time you will evolve. That is law. This is why if I could push a button that would place upon me all of the horror required to reach the other side, I would push it. Unfortunately you cannot repel your agency. If you want enlightenment, you must push the button and hold it down until it is done. I think at best, you will hold it down until you know it is not the answer. I leaned in long enough for a momentary glance. I perceived mystery but for a moment, and my hubris was swiftly killed. Now I am afraid of the dark, but my aspirations have not been snuffed out. The reward of my weak travail offers up another route.
I Know My Story
Chance friend Barto,
Where to begin for a fellow I have scarcely met. I hope this letter finds you safe and well, and with some progress in your novel. Memories of amber light, wooden walls and that muffled blue over your hardy pasture grass dance across these lonely hills. I have a potent tale to relay, and by some unseen string of logic it must be you I tell. Forgive me if this strikes as forwardness from an all-but-stranger. Listen anyways, for this is a fierce and true account, not for those of weak constitution.
On my travels I have encountered many a strange place, many evidences of a great variety I am not clever enough to understand. On one day where overcast was a sea, a dark sea of thick, thick clouds, I chanced upon a sparse wood. Sparse at first, it grew thick with trunks and needles in shades you could anticipate in a painting, but hardly in true wood up from the ground before your eyes.
Until a clearing. Mysterious, marbled walls it had, of dark pine and forest depth. A vast, cloudy ceiling let in pale clarity and drew me towards.
I fail now to pronounce the tremors in my limbs as I pen what sight displayed itself within.
A figure, without a fire, crouched upon an uneven stone, looking on me through a wooden mask. The mask was shaped into the wide gaze of an owl and crowned with great antlers. Shirtless, loose pants were the only garb.
So seizing was this sight before me, all with which my heart was laden vaporized beneath the clutch of this figure’s visage. I could not at all move, and I could not stop shaking. It was not by affect of the mask but by something else. It was the way the figure was still, explosively motionless, an immaculate equipoise. I was frozen in an incredulous stupor and stripped of my faculties for escape. After an unidentifiable length of time it spake our tongue.
”I know my story”
…
”Let me tell you a tale”
And I heard a story in our own tongue, of which I cannot reproduce a word. It sent guttural meanings and sang its speech in rhythms I could not divide. Only — I still retain — humongous images, a sense of ringing true, and, seared into me, a mother’s tears. I cannot shake the feeling that I heard a great tale, and as if a mother’s tears set the world in motion.
I marveled at the figure, but I was just a piece of wood to it and I fled, fueled by dread. I made great distance and have penned this through the night.
Now Barto, forget it if you must, but keep my account carefully. Bury it in the ground if you must, but don’t discard it, please. A secret danced in that clearing, a secret that would step off the world or kneel and die with no regard for human witness. Heavy as this story is to bear, it would become our race to know some of what lies underneath the unturned stones. I am grateful if you will do as I ask. I am already deep in gratitude that there was you to tell. Thank you. My journey will go on for some chapters, I wonder when I will meet the horizon.
Farewell again,
Beddem
A Time Travel Story
[I accidentally deleted this post from last year while trying to publish my latest. Posted for some Prose time-travel challenge. ]
"Don't go too far."
The sun shone still higher over the cobblestones as the ice cubes melted into the lemonade and the paper straw virtuously softened into decomposable uselessness. The weathered metal chair and table were a frame for sun-rays warming a face and a chest that ached and ached and ached.
His hand lay still over the tabletop as he imagined wedging his fingers into the little gaps of the woven metal rods or knocking with his legs and falling backwards to where he could look straight up at the blue, blue sky. Something some better version of him might do.
It was warm.
He got up and dealt with his cup. He set off down the old road to the white plaster building with the black 764 by the door that he knew was two blocks away. The man he had met with two months ago would be waiting in there for sure.
"In theory, you could go back before this country even existed, the strength of our machine is quite vast. Is there someone you'd like to meet? An event you wish you could have seen?"
"Certainly."
That old man had smelled like coffee and onions, and the building was all white walls and plastic, just like a cheap hospital waiting-room. Standing outside the door in the comfortable summer air, the man took in a few last breaths. The wad of money, the crystal-clear marble, and the little slip of notepaper were still in his pockets. He was ready, he was doing this (somehow). He went in.
...
Click clack-- the old onion-man tickled the machinery as he chatted with his waiting test-subject.
"Are you sure that's the place and time for you?" he asked, sorely chagrined.
"Yes, thank you."
"And only 5 minutes?"
"That's right."
"Gah... could I have picked a lamer person?" he complained to the blinking lights and whirring bits. "Ok," he sighed, "you're all set. Maine, South Portland, 10 years ago. Head on in."
The man took in a breath that shocked him as he opened his eyes to a sky whose blue was softer but more beautiful than that from this morning. The air vibrated with nostalgia and a rush of happiness splashed over his brain and danced around his heartache. It's a moment like this that threatens to swell the heart too much, for there is the joy and also the remembrance of how lonely you really have been. Both swirl in the heart with the blood in great volume and you wonder if it's enough to stop a heart for good. But for a man who has spent a decade getting out of bed despite the anchor of his ceaseless pain, not even this is enough to keep him lying on the ground. His limbs moved as though creatures on their own, and he moved and sat on the bench that waited off the sidewalk.
Checking his watch, he saw that two minutes had passed. He sat back and wedged his fingers into each of the little gaps in the woven metal rods, pondering the sky.
"Any minute now..." He looked down and sure enough, an 18 year old with disheveled red hair and a pensive gait was arriving from a distance. The man waited and looked expectantly at the boy.
"You look just like me." said that boy. The man returned the statement by rising from the bench with a knowing smile (and the uncertainty sloshing in his stomach) and hugging the boy as best as he knew how. The young boy, so hungry and ready for anything strange in his life, hugged him just the same. The strange and symmetrical embrace under the pale blue sky continued for quite some time as they both felt a mixture of knowledge and subsiding doubt.
The man remembering the restraint of time, stood back, and frowned at the watch. With a hasty zeal he shoved into his pockets for the money and the things, and brought them out for the bizarrely calm boy standing on the sidewalk with his hands on the straps of his backpack.
"Here, and here and h--" The marble, then the money, went into the boy's hand. The wrinkled bit of note paper came close and fluttered, suddenly freed into the sky by an abrupt disappearance from the anachronistic visitor. A gust of salty wind blew across the green and grey ground and into the boy's nose as he chased the scrip and pinned it against the asphalt with his fingertips.
The boy stood where he was and unfolded the slip and stared at it with a hard-beating heart.
"I've waited and waited, and it wasn't worth it. Love, You"
The boy considered falling to his knees but instead went and sat at the bench waiting by the sidewalk. He stared at the stack of bills he had just been given. As the wind blew again and the sea-smell charged his lungs, he sighed. What he had to do was going to be very hard.
Worst Enemy
The blade-wielding woman is already in the room. I watch her nonchalantly in my astral form. The aggressor of my aggressor.
How careful her prowl, and her prodding, methodical. It's just a matter of time, and I look as if in a glass box at the emotions competing for my attention. There is glee, a sick, vengeful kind I detest. Also reverence, for a new era, my life will change with this killing.
An odd place for a killing, this one. What kind of crazy kills in white, and with the lights on?
I chuckle at my own self-entertainment as the surgeon calls out and moves her scalpel into a specific spot in the opened head of my body. To think that just a few tiny cuts will cure my psychosis for good.
"Is this really it?" I see her hand poised to strike.
"It is." I'm about to be cured. All the pain of being confused and outcast is about to die with those brain cells.
Snip. CRACK.
"What is this?" And my astral form explodes with pain.
Snip. CRACK. Somehow I'm dissolving into nothing.
"Wait-- how much am I--"
Snip. CRACK.
"I--"
Snip.