O, Sweet Words

My name is W.G, and this is how I came up with one of the most famous catchphrases of all time.

I was wading my way through the first chapters of my novel, my mind spilling word after word, sentence after sentence. However, I reached that land where the foliage was rarefying and a barren dry desert awaited me beyond the horizon. That part of the process where the excitement starts to fade and you begin to wonder whether or not you should abandon the whole thing, quit writing and just enjoy a simple life like my fellow human beings. Nevertheless, I kept marching on, heart full of doubt, finger joints layered with rust, and not before long I had already bumped into a colossal writer’s block. The stream of my ideas came to a halt before the great void, the supreme vacuum, the Leviathan of all writers that devoured every single shred of inspiration that crossed their way. Of course I had to fight him, I had to slay him, or else I wouldn’t have finished the novel that would later on turn into one of the greatest works of cinema. Only, I didn’t know how to, at the time.

To be fair, my task at my hands was no easy feat, even for the most fluid of storytellers. I was supposed to write down the part where the protagonist undergoes a transformation, The transformation. Where he becomes someone different, stronger, braver; you get the gist. Let me tell you on a little secret before we proceed: one cannot write successfully such a transformation unless one has experienced it himself. In other words, one must go through the necessary pain to become a good writer; that is the first act of initiation, the first ritual, the true baptism of fire: blood must be spilled. And fortunately, I have bled enough.

It was a simple equation, though I couldn’t quite figure how to formulate it correctly at the time. It goes something like this: the necessary amount of agony that is required to catalyze such metamorphosis could be best obtained from one single source only, and that is love. Love is the nemesis of pain, his eternal rival, his amaranthine companion. Search for love, and you, my friend, will unearth treasures of pain.

Now I only had to find the right amount of love in my life.

Typewriter on my lap, an ashtray full of cigarette butts on my left, a cold cup of coffee and a half tuna sandwich on my right. I look around, out the window and inside the living room. What time is it? The clock is missing. When she left, she took away everything that belonged to her, and left behind everything that didn’t: her books, her pajamas, her shirts and underwear, her stockings, her shoes and even her cushions (though I don’t know how she came to decide which ones belonged to her and which ones didn’t). And she even took the cat, which was by no means hers alone. As to the photos in the family album—which consisted mainly of two people—she’d also done a perfect job: hers were gone, mine were still there, and the ones we shared were cut in half. Leafing through the album gave me gray pangs, it’s as if I have forever been alone, at home, in my travels and in my dreams. I fully understand what she tried to do. She tried to make it look as if she’d never existed in my life. It’ll make things easier for me to move on. I don’t think she realizes that both the presence and absence of things exert the same strain on our memories. Because when I try to make a cheese panini, and can’t find the panini-press—because she took it—I’ll remember just the same that my wife had been sleeping with my best friend for seven months, and that if she hadn’t confessed on her own free will, I wouldn’t have had the slightest clue about what was going on. She said I had been too focused on my writing. She said she felt abandoned and he made her feel beautiful again. She made a point, the cunt. I had to divorce her.

Maximus, my best friend, my brother in arms, my antagonist—or perhaps I was his antagonist, and he was the protagonist all along—I light another cigarette and think of him. He was always one step ahead of me, in school, in sports, in careers—he was a doctor—however I have always been a better writer than he is, that was the only standing pillar I leaned on whenever the strong winds of his success overwhelmed me and made me feel like shit. Maximus and I loved the same woman, twice.

Thinking of your wife sleeping with another man, picturing another male inside your wife is stifling enough, crushing, annihilating; especially if that man was both your friend and rival. But strangely enough, that wasn’t the pain I remembered that November evening as I tried to write what would later on become one of the most famous catchphrases of all time, but a different kind of pain, one that happened many years ago, when we were ten, Maximus and I.

I’d been madly in love with our classmate, Chloe, and so was Maximus. Of course. If you think about it, that’s why we were very close buddies, him and I, because we’ve had the same taste in music, in movies, in video games, in sodas, and in women. At that age neither of us dared to confess his feelings to Chloe, or to one another (about Chloe). Having feelings for a girl when you are a child is something of extreme secrecy, of extreme sacredness and beauty. I used to throw all my erasers in the river on my way to school only to ask Chloe to lend me hers, and get a chance to talk to her, and then see her smile when I give it back and thank her. You might think that I didn’t have to throw my erasers in the river, but I made an oath to never lie to Chloe. I might lie to many other people, cheat on them, deceive them, but never to Chloe; if I was going to ask her for her eraser, I had to be truly in need of one. It was a matter of principles. Even the Pharaoh who claimed to be God and spilled oceans of innocent blood had a small status of a deity in his room that he kept sacred and prayed to when no one was looking. Chloe was my unsullied deity, Oh Chloe. In my mind and fantasy, I was convinced I was going to marry her when I am old enough, I had all my future figured and laid before me. Sadly enough, the future I had wasn’t that different from the one I’d imagined when I was ten, except that I didn’t marry Chloe. Maximus did. Then divorced her, last year.

How did I lose the fight to Maximus over Chloe you might think? It was a matter of seconds, perhaps even a second. We were going home from school one afternoon, beautiful day, rosy clouds drifted low, birds chirped in the distance, the waft of spring in the air; it was the worst day of my childhood. We were going home from school, and halfway, we came to notice that Chloe and her friend were being bullied from across the street, by a group of older boys from the other neighborhood . They were three, bad boys, sort of speak. The kind you’d avoid and apprehend as a child. But they were on Chloe, my dear Chloe, and I had to do something. At that instant, Chloe saw us, Maximus and I. Her eyes met mine, and I could see a speck of hope growing in those bewitching green pearls. I could see she glimpsed salvation in her frail docile classmates.

It was out of the question by then. The deal was sealed. It didn’t matter how many punches I was going to eat, it didn’t matter how ecchymotic my eyes would look and how badly fractured my nose would be. I braced myself, and was ready to go berserk.

But it was too late.

In the long span of time the nerve signal from my brain took to reach my muscles, Maximus had already took off, and I froze.

It was too late, Chloe had seen who it was to first run to her rescue. Her dark knight had already been decided, and I had realized it. He beat me to it. Maximus pushed one guy, and landed a punch on another, and received a hard kick in the stomach by the third. He managed to land on his feet and took a few steps back, and it was then, like a revelation, like a hymn from the heavens, that I’ve heard the most sweet words to my ears: “Run Maximus, Run!” yelled Chloe. Only, they weren’t for me.

He took off running, and they were right after him, and she kept yelling, with all her might, with all her breath, like a goddess trying to save her mortal hero from a raging Cerberus: “Run Maximus, Run!” And I stood there, in haze, swinging like a pendulum of a handless clock, between worrying about my friend and a killing regret. It should have been me who were running for his life, it should have been for me that those lyrical words were being chanted in the air. But no, they were for my Maximus, who’s speed kept increasing each time she shouted out those words. And I could almost see, for a fleeting second, that he grew shining wings on his back and flew through the oblique line of time and claimed Chloe’s future, and robbed me of mine.

“Run, Maximus. Run!” O, that sweet voice.

The next morning Chloe walked to Maximus, thanked him, felt his stomach, and he confessed. And the next hour they were holding hands sitting on the bench and eating lunch together. For another year, colors diverged from my eyes and faded somewhere in the background. That’s when I first made my acquaintance with pain, met him face to face, shook his hand, and walked home from school with for months on end.

Middle school came and I forgot about Chloe, and so did Maximus (they met again years later in college). But I can still remember that day with great vividness, that day when I first tasted loss and been stung by the unforgiving, aesthetic, blue flames of love. It is etched in the back of my head like an epitaph on the stone of a hollow cold grave. And I did remember it, that day when I tried to write but couldn’t, and looked at the clock but it was missing because my wife took it, because we got divorced, because she cheated on me with Maximus, Mon meilleur ami, Chloe’s ex husband. And I was able to write again.

“Run Forrest, Run!” Jenny shouted, and Forrest ran like he never did, and never stopped.