My story, “Double Dutch,” is up at Scapezine as of this moment! The amazing Galen Dara illustrated it like she knew my own mind. I wrote this story during Week 3 at Clarion West in 2010. So happy it has a home now. And it’s a beautiful home. I don’t think I can go to sleep now–and I apologize in advance if you read it and find you don’t want to eat eggs in the morning.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.” -Rumi
I have regrets. The ways my life has unfolded are both beautiful and fraught. We’re never completely one thing or another. We’re multiple, never-ending, scintillating beasts that enrapture and enrage. We frustrate, we devour, we bleed upon one another and ask for more.
I would give all of myself if I had it to give, but that’s just the way–I don’t know what all of anything is. Will never know. In each moment I change, burst into a ray of colors ill defined and misunderstood. I will be kind, as kind as I can be, and still be capable of causing pain. I could be angry, as mean as I could be, and still be capable of grace. I will love, as much as I can, and still break because love always comes in its own way. The only thing I accept about myself is contradiction.
So, yes, regrets, because the self, as far as it extends into the future, is unknowable, uncontrollable, despite our need, our desire to shape it to our current existence.
So much I want in this world, so many moments I let wrap through and around me, that make me ache for the real, the now, the forever. And in my mind worlds expand, unravel, pull me through a million scenes, both real and imagined, all saying, “You, you are multiple, full of possibility and inevitability and everything you do, forever, will bring you to one single point, always, always, and then you’ll move forward again, into a new era, a new life that is both you and not you, forever changing.”
But that only lasts so long–life ends eventually. We leave pieces of ourselves behind, scribbled on pages, hoping someone somewhere understands, who pieces together the lives we lived and did not live, discovers something hidden to ourselves, something we always wanted known but could never say. This is the writer inside, the one who is whole and broken and always a contradiction. Because this is to be human. This is to love and be loved and to give and to take and to sit inside the world with intention and with presence and to try to tell our stories however they come, ever shambling, beautifully incomplete.
A few weeks back, before World Fantasy Con, I came up with a “five-year plan.” If you know me, you know I’ve been struggling with concentration and focus, problems erupting from teaching too many classes, not giving myself enough headspace, etc. This plan was to help me regain that clarity of vision, to help me write consistently and to do something with myself. I thought I’d share it because it seems that as soon as I put it to paper, at least one of the things I’d written for Year One occurred (and that is to get out of teaching composition by 2012). The image is below. I may not achieve everything on it, but I’m very close to hitting the higher points for Year One, so that’s encouraging.
And speaking of World Fantasy Con, I’ve written another post in that vein, but have decided not to publish it just yet. We’ll see. It has something to do with my reluctance to write, of fear of exposure, of letting others know too much. I never thought I’d be so self-absorbed as to worry about that problem. But it has appeared and I’ll have to overcome that issue if I want to succeed.
Since I’m having such trouble with productivity lately, I figured I could use this webpage to motivate myself. I wrote this the other night, riffing on the book that lives beneath my fingertips, but this passage is unlikely to make it into my novel. It asked me to write it in this particular tense, with this particular focus. Two paragraphs, about a girl who just accidentally killed the boy she’s had the hots for. That’s my world right now. What follows below may not make much sense now, but that’s a good thing. I can’t always answer for my subconscious.
Excerpt, from Throwaways:
Lightning strikes as she closes her eyes. The bulging white light singes them, a musty smoke invading her mouth. We don’t stand close–she is suspect, dangerous. A being we cannot and will not know. Around her, rain drops freeze and shatter against the ground. The brick wall caves in and reveals bones–old bones–the lives left behind so that this world could plunder on. She unburies them. Unburies everything so that the cycle becomes clear. After a moment, with her closed eyes alight and still burning, the vision appears.
He is not dead, cannot be dead–his heart stopped, he floats in the ethers, between what is and what will not be. All her flames, lashing light that stopped his life from growing into the coming minutes, act as surrogates–the boundary between this world and that. But she does not embody death. It is only life her fingers twist and turn and touch into existence. On the other side, the realm of the in-between, he waits for permission to come back. And what he brings with him calls on the future, asks it to caress their bodies with some truth of what she is and cannot know.