The most curious thing of all was that X 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 of course, 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?
“Perhaps, ah, perhaps 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 some warmth. Everything had to come out, for survival, of course!
But winter writing tended always towards a shade of blue. 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 a bit around her and she knew it was him, Boredom, sneaking in 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, DAMNIT.
Boredom simply made you mush. Boxed mashed potato mush. Manila folder colored flakes–just add water and…mush!
In anycase. The big, sexy city of New York was simply there, outside of 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, like, each cover is a different color and shows only part of the girl’s body, you know? Like her mouth, but she’s wearing a different color lipstick on each. But at twenty five she couldn’t be starring in a YA novel, she gave herself more credit than that.
There was a week where it felt like a romance. The silly little thing took herself to the sun drenched beaches of Mexico with a boy around Christmas time. The holidays and tequila certainly warm one’s heart. Oh, and it would have been the total trashy romance type, a cover of all abs and cleavage. A shard of moonlight illuminating sweaty bodies entangled in the sand. 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.”
In any case here we are back in snowy New York, and the only things flowing are slush down the street, people out of the subway, and piss down the telephone poles.
So maybe she was in a satire. The world certainly had become something worthy of a good humorous critique. So unbelievable was what was taking place life itself seemed a satire – an absurd mockery of something deranged and unhinged from reality. But in this world would she be writer or subject? Because if she were the subject of a satire that would mean it was she who was the mockery.
No, that was all wrong. The youngest of six children, X evolved with skin thick enough to bear the brunt of a joke or two, but she took herself a bit too seriously to be trapped in the pages of a satire. Plus, while healthily modest, she simply couldn’t see an entire book being filled with a critique of her.
Truly, the way she viewed her life was through the lilt of poetry. Words cradling all love and fear and hopes in their sinewy formations; stringy and tough and dependable are words. She could always place her dreams there.
She supposed first she would need to determine two things: Was she writing her own story or was it 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 would find one of those.