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2008-05-21 - 10:56 a.m.
When I came across the big red, plastic storage box that has been crammed into a tiny storage unit for the last three years and out of my reach, I was at once relieved, excited and almost sick to my stomach with apprehension. This red box houses some of my most embarrassing life stories. Including love letters from lots of boys whose hearts I trampled all over. Also inside that box are all my old journals and all my old writings pre-computer age. Needless to say, the night that I decide to go through that box, I drank a bottle of wine, cried my eyes out and had a three or four day regret and guilt hangover after having gone through all those letters and journals. As for the writings...well. I've known for a long time that I missed my writing boat when I didn't really focus my attentions and energy back when I was 22-ish. I think that had I, I don't know, enrolled in a writing program or something worthwhile, at that age I could have been something. I can read (with my keen editors eye) my writing from that era and I can see not just a glimmer of talent, but a pretty blatant spotlight. That's not to say that anything I ever wrote in my twenties was good (the novel I wrote was the worst thing I've ever read)...but it could have been with some rigid discipline and practice. So...that said...I found this beat up piece of paper in that box with seven lovely paragraphs on it. It is really, really good. As I was reading it I was breathless with my own accomplishment and also mentally chastising myself for spelling and punctuation errors. It seemed very much that I had written these seven paragraphs in some burst of youthful inspiration. But then I came to one word, one sentence that just didn't seem to be something I would write. The word, "flute", was just not a word I would ever, in a million years, think to write. Every other thing in those seven paragraphs is totally my style (over-use of commas especially), my thought process, my writing. But that word, flute, just threw a wrench in the whole thing and I am convinced that there is no way I wrote it. But I don't have any idea who did. I must have read it somewhere and thought that, wow, this sounds like something I would write and then copied it down. Anyway, it's driving me crazy...so I'm going to post it here and maybe one of you literary geniuses will know who wrote this piece. Because I'd like to read more. ****** "I want to go for a walk," I heard her lips as they moved across the room, plaintive wandering of her eyes as they seemed to beseech the windows to fall open to the air, to engulf her dried body with the lushness of the breeze. He lifted her from the steadiness of the wooden chair, tender now, must not damage the frail translucence of the moment, need, her arms wrapped around his neck and he tucked her within the folds of the metal chair and wheeled her to the door. I followed the soft ponderings of his gait, past the heavy doors and into the light, the bookshelves and the silence hushed as we three entered the sounds of natures music, seeping into my eardrums the echo of a million voices left behind on the trails of wind. If I stand here, poised against this tree, the book folded open, far enough so that my eyes could remain with them, yet appear engrossed in the flute of the words brimming beneath my sight, then I may remain to watch this love song composed. He placed her beneath the willow tree, her legs dangling freely against the cold metal, I shudder imagining the feel of the cold steel against my skin, her hands reaching forwards and upwards pushing the season towards her breath, she breathes into me now, her being myself and humanity, I imagine she says, "I do not wish to be an invalid, nor invalid if that is what they imply. If I can taste the freedom of the wind, suckle the nourishment from its laden breast, if I can breathe the scent of life and harbor the message within my lungs, then I am one, and all, I am the world and all its people, I have reason and I believe in my validation." That is her, crippled beauty and him the loving soul and me the transient host of other peoples beings. I hold my hand out and touch them picture of them, slowly, one by one, my fingers fold around the image, cradles now in the palm of my hand where I shall keep the stillness of that day, the reality of her, of our existence, as one
all valid and all together. ******** In other news...I start a Spanish class today. Which is probably too late to start learning Spanish. I mean, for the obvious reasons and because I think that by next month when all vocabulary that I know is finally able to be put into coherent sentences, the Mexicans where I work will be gone. The guy I work for is a total asshole about the Mexicans. Last week he said to me, "I don't know if the Spanish are the same class of people as the Mexicans, but they do speak the same language...did you find the Spanish as lazy and irresponsible as they Mexicans?" To which I kind of stammered something like, "Uh...uh...uh...". He's always talking about how stupid the Mexicans are. And I'm trying to not say what I want to say because that would get me fired and am instead trying to point out how difficult it is to live in a country when you haven't yet mastered the language. I can't believe he can say the Mexicans are lazy when all of them work far and above over 40 hours a week. The dishwasher works double shifts every single day of the week and I have yet to see him not busily working away at something. Meanwhile, the owner guy is always sitting around smoking cigarettes. Yesterday when I arrived to work he was eating the biggest bowl of ice cream I've ever seen and then sat around for hours afterwards while we were all busily trying to cover the door, the cash register and our own serving duties, because his poor belly hurt. Anyway. I am taking the Spanish class and then I am going to start taking French classes. Because that's what I really want to learn better. If things go the way I am planning them...Eric and I will be sitting in a cafe in Paris at this moment four months from now. We are both homesick. That is all. |
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