21,917 Grapefruits

(photo credit: "Grapefruit" by Alex Engel)

(in memory of Charlie)

She’s forgotten what it’s like to hold a pen in her hand, and I can’t blame her. There are memories I’ve dismembered, their limbs strong as my will to forget. We carry on in the only ways we know how.

Two feet or one in front of the other, the plan is to keep moving. Collect breaths, sporadically as we find them. Under unturned stones, beneath the keys of typewriters untouched. Keep moving.

My mother says she can’t remember the smell of oranges. My father ate citrus with every breakfast. 21,917 grapefruits; she counted.

Daily constitutions change. Once, she wrote him letters every afternoon and washed the ink off her hands in the evenings. Now she takes her skin to the dry cleaner, presses time into the wrinkles of her breast pocket, bakes stories untold into casseroles every time she touches the stove.

Grandma burns the flag, sets fire to everything but the dark. The closets are where she stores her freedom, the socks she knit Grandpa during the war. She postmarks her nights 1944 and leaves the bedroom window open in case word comes from the trees. Their hands were pencils once, she says. Grandma’s old now.

Mother says insanity is all a matter of perspective, memory a matter of how blank you like your clean slate. She drinks her coffee black these days. I’ve switched to herbal tea.

The Guy Won't Die

(photo credit: "With Graffiti You Never Feel Lonely" by Justin Case)

Ever tried to kill a character who refuses to die? I'm not talking urban-fantasy gnome or umpteenth-sequel slasher -- just an average guy who refuses to be killed off. I get him to the proverbial cliff, and he insists I let him stick around a little longer.

Not unlike the invasive neighbor who stops by to borrow a cup of sugar and somehow ends up inviting herself over for cake, this character's a manipulative bitch. I'm beginning to hate him. So why can't I push him off the balcony already?

If you know me, you know that I am incapable of working with an outline. I can't grocery shop from a list, and I can't write fiction with a plan. Dyslexia or plain-old madness, I'm not sure which. All I know is, the moment I try to structure a story is the moment in which my muse catches a flight to Tahiti. Then she comes back drunk and wants me to document her latest stint in rehab. It's just not pretty.

So I wrote the first draft of this novel via my usual method: give birth to a handful of characters and let them live their lives. Usually, this is as far as I get. I purge the story from my system with a rough draft, then I move on to something else. Most of my manuscripts wouldn't sell; I'm just not that talented or determined.

This one has been different. It's felt promising. I went back to it twice and re-worked weak plot points, gave certain deserving scenes more depth, and breathed a bit more life into corners which felt too dark.

By round three I felt stuck. Something wasn't right. This one particular character seemed to be overstepping his bounds, overshadowing the bigger picture. He showed up in scenes where he wasn't wanted and overstayed his welcome. It was time for him to go.

This posed a few problems. The most obvious dilemma is that the physical death of another character is crucial to my main theme. The less threatening obstacle is that the whole book revolves around the metaphorical death and rebirth of the main character. Could the reader survive a third loss without wanting to kill me?

Round four: I had a plan and restructured everything necessary to implement the solution. As I was doing it, I felt how I imagine a surgeon must feel while cutting into the depths of a patient he knows in his heart he is going to lose. I was left with a body I couldn't resurrect.

Skip forward to round five. (Round four was just too messy.) Back to the previous draft, the fork in the road, the point at which I would send Mr. Troublesome on his merry way without hurting anybody too much. He stared back at me from the page, looked me in the eye and said "You're kidding me, right?" He stomped his foot and refused.

At this point, I'm completely frustrated. I'm beginning to sympathize with writers who pull a deus ex machina. Remember Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions?

"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.

"I know," I said.

Well, I'm no Vonnegut. But I'm considering inflecting a few suicidal tendencies upon this murder-proof character of mine. It's either him or me.

Learning Out Loud

(photo credit: "Learning to Walk" by Tela Chhe)

Friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers have been discussing generation gaps for as far back as I can remember. I always dismissed these discussions as silly. After all, people are just people. We can relate to each other if we try, right?

Then the internet was born.

I'm 30. According to various sources, I'm of the X generation. This means little to me other than that I have learned through numerous trials and errors that when someone more than twenty years older than I am says "That's very X-gen of you," the best response is to politely smile and nod. Never ask whether it's a compliment or an insult. That will only bring on the dreaded discussion of the gap.

Here's the thing I've only recently realized: if there's a gap here, my generation is currently bridging it. That's very "uncool" for a gephyrophobic like me. (I'd have never made it as Simon or Garfunkel.) But it's the best analogy I can come up with.

If we're not the bridge, we're simply torn. Raised by a grandmother whose motto was "What goes on in this house stays in this house" and raising a girl whose history teacher's mantra is "Get your assignment into the cloud by Friday," we are somewhere in the middle. We want to know our privacy is there when we want it, but we also tend to learn out loud.

I remember very clearly the embarrassment of learning to ride a bike. I was ten and uncoordinated. All my friends could speed around corners and ride with no hands, while I toppled toward the earth with training wheels. My friends' moms, who were also my mom's friends, sat around in lounge chairs trying -- although not very well -- to stifle their laughter. At one point, I was distracted by my mother's cackling and looked back only to crash head-on into a stop sign and land in a bush. Today, my mother has no memory of this. No one was there with a digital camera. No one captured the moment to YouTube. My mother was not a mommyblogger. For this much, I am grateful.

Fast-forward two decades, and I'm still making a lot of mistakes. Difference is, most of you have seen them. They have been captured in comments sections, twitted, or flickred. Sometimes by me, other times without my consent. But they're out there, to haunt me forever, as the most colorful memories do. And chances are, Google won't forget.

Certain events which have transpired online this week have had me reflecting and ruminating. Lately, the gap is seeming wider and less bridgeable. My life is becoming more complicated and busier. I frequently consider giving up the social aspect of the internet, because it can be draining. I sometimes forget the good parts.

I chatted with a friend this evening. I've known her for going on twelve years, but I've never met her face-to-face. We first came across each other on a message board, one of those places people talked online before "social media" were invented. She has followed me through multiple websites, countless blogs, a few jobs and many life choices. We rarely write on each other's walls, but we email quite a bit. As much time as I spend online, and as much of myself as I've put out there, I think it's safe to say she knows me better than many of the people in my "real life" -- as they say.

Tonight, after we swapped stories about our weeks, she said, "I've enjoyed watching you grow up."

It was out of the blue, and a bit motherly. I was taken aback for a moment before I remembered that she's nearly my mother's age. Instinctively, I smiled and nodded.

It's easy to forget the gap if you're not looking for it.

And sometimes, even when you're staring it right in the face, it doesn't matter at all.

Starting at The End

(photo credit: "The End" by deedoucette)

When I write short stories, nine times out of ten I write the last sentence first. Not sure why. Maybe I like to know where I’ll end up. I don’t have to know how I’m going to get there in order to find my way, but knowing where I’m going seems to inspire me not to quit in the middle.

That one remaining time, I write the first sentence first. It usually comes to me at 3:00 a.m., because my muse is nocturnal. She’s also a real pest, but I digress. Anyway, it’s always these first-sentence-first stories which are the toughest for me to get through, though they sometimes prove themselves to be the most interesting if I’m patient and stick with them.

The middle of the night last night brought such a story. The first paragraph poured forth a metaphor I believed, at 3:45 a.m., would carry the story. I was wrong. I fell asleep, lost my flow, and by morning lost my confidence in the middle-of-the-night metaphor. I worked on it for half an hour during a late lunch break today, but I didn’t get very far. I was distracted with work and other things. Such is a typical day, which is probably why my muse prefers to torture me at night – it’s quieter.

By now, it's 10:30 p.m. I've finished everything I have to do for the day, no one else is awake, and I have all the time in the world. (Note: I'm an insomniac, which is handy sometimes.) Yet, my muse seems to be napping. I've poked her and bathed her and tried to bribe her with a cookie, but nothing.

In a final effort to resurrect her, I've written the last sentence. It's not a good last sentence. But I do what it takes to provoke her into playing on my terms one-tenth of the time. We'll see how it turns out.

Wildflowers and Weeds

(photo credit: "Sun Flower" by Old Sarge)

There's a fine line between wildflowers and weeds. This is the conclusion I've drawn from research sparked by the question of an autistic five-year-old who asked, "What's the difference?"

Character vs Self

(photo credit: "Run baby run" by Dimitri Castrique)

My father once told me "The most dangerous battles war so deeply within us that there's little hope even the bravest saint could save us in time."

You would've had to have been loved by my father to understand the irony of that statement. I wouldn't wish that upon you, and I'll venture to say he wouldn't have either. However, as one of few beloveds who knew him better than anyone, I am starting to realize why the story I'm attempting to write about him is becoming more and more about me -- and less about him -- with each passing page.

I've been torn between giving up completely and attempting to rework my theme. It seems I'm less suited to recreate my father's conflict with the world than I am to reproduce my own conflict with myself. The latter is a worthwhile exercise, perhaps, but not one I want to live out in ink through my father's character.

Early this morning, in my insomniatic state, I fumbled through a few of the roughest chapters in hopes of saving them from themselves. The sad conclusion: I'm constitutionally incapable of separating myself from my father.

I sat in the darkness for hours, trying to convince myself it wasn't so. There couldn't possibly be no way in hell to save this thing. After all, I inherited my father's stubbornness as well as his eyes.

When the sun eventually began to show its face, I was reminded of something else my father was fond of telling me: "Make no mistake about it, kiddo. In this world, it's us versus them."

As a daughter, desperate for escape, I cringed at the notion. As a writer, hoping for a happy ending, I'm considering embracing it.

Naked Brunch

(photo credit: "Fancy restaurant in London" by Jana Werner)

There are some days when putting on pants takes too much energy.

That’s the shortest way I’ve found to attempt to describe depression to anyone who has never been more than blue.

I had brunch with a friend this morning, because I was unable to dress myself in time for breakfast. Said friend has rarely touched dark blue. If she were a mood ring, she would maintain a steady turquoise even in her worst moments.

As such, we have a pact to talk about anything except my occasional inability to put on pants. Similarly, we’ve agreed to never discuss her ongoing affair with a man whose wife I will always side with on principle. Best to stick to common threads, we’ve said.

Today was an exception.

Over coffee, she cried about her lover who recently left her. An eight year affair breeds attachment, apparently, even if it’s to an ever unraveling tether. Together, we shared our grief over common quandaries: her false hope of what she’d fantasized her life could be and my wavering wish that someday I’ll wake up and want to live. Morbid as it may sound, it was a nice chat.

As emotionally raw as I may appear to be in my writing – especially in my fiction, ironically – I rarely allow myself to be so vulnerable in my day to day encounters. Even with trusted friends, I am guarded. I attribute this to having been abused as a child and therefore having honed the instinct to protect myself from potential danger, even when none is present. I can analyze the crap out of anything but can rarely feel.

The past few weeks have been emotional ones, for a variety of reasons. My empathy levels have been high, and I haven’t been sleeping. My defenses aren’t at their best, which has been made evident by my body. I have a fever, my head is throbbing, and muscles I didn’t know I had are aching. The last thing I wanted to do this morning was leave my warm nest. But I’m glad I did.

My friend, a fellow fan of the beats, brought up Burrough's explanation for the meaning behind the title of Naked Lunch: “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

That was brunch. How it’ll digest, I am not yet certain.