Bonus after the apocalypse
01 December 2011 09:16 AM Categories: Writing prompts
I steal them in the coffee shops, I press my hands into their shoulders to feel the cool, smooth flesh underneath, malleable as clay. The man is frozen, the cell phone attached via a thick line of resin. He’s painted over. Maybe he was alive once, but it’s all over for him now. Caught like a butterfly on a pin.
I am tired. This morning on my daily phone call with my mother, we talked Christmas and the apocalypse. Do you know how good the apocalypse, the end times, is for jokes? My mother was telling me that no one wanted to hear her Christmas thoughts and then I said she should send out an animated card with: an asteroid busting the earth into a million pieces; the sky darkening with pollution; the blasts of volcanoes across the world, silencing us all in a thick blanket of ash. We laughed, both at the inappropriateness of the imagery and at how it matches my mother’s thoughts about humanity: maybe the world would be better off without us. Merry xmas and thank you, Jesus.
Years ago, when my first husband and I lived in a great brick Victorian in Ohio, we had a pair of loopy neighbors, two elderly sisters who were physical opposites. There was the lean one, wrinkled and mannish, and the plump one, blowsy and uncontainable. It could be they were each teetering on the edge of Alzheimer's or dementia. They were definitely not all there. One afternoon, after months of cajoling, my husband and I sat in the sisters' stuffy living room, drinking overly sweet cocktails mixed with swizzle sticks accented by the shapely forms of women's asses. We listened politely as the thin one talked of the end times, how they were a'coming, you could see the signs.
The end times were coming then, they are coming now, one way or another. Nobody gets out of here alive, so make the best of what you’ve got while you’ve got it. A pat ending from a tired mind.
Bonus
This an excerpt from the post I deleted a few days ago. I almost posted the original write, but don't think that's the best blog fodder. This is a bit more filtered. I want it out here, but I also want to disguise it slightly. That makes this post a twofer, a split personality, an indulgence.
This morning’s writing prompt was “the lines.” The first thing that came to me was a scene in a van at night, my boyfriend D across from me, the wood-veneer table between us, me with a half-empty Molson in my hand. He poured white powder out of a cloudy brown vial onto the agate slice he had bought in a mountainside gift store earlier that day. He began to cut the powder with a razor blade. Lines. White lines. Just like the song that will now dog me until I go to sleep.
The next scene that popped up was a construction site in Stillpond, Maryland on a Saturday in February. The house, a plywood skeleton emerging out of red mud, was surrounded by the naked torsos of winter trees. My feet squelched in the mud, my hands were raw, and my breath made clouds in the air. D and I were there to see his boss, this hulk of a man who lived large (and is now, I believe, dead). There were lines. And more lines. And more, leading to the quick heartbeat and talk talk and then the flowing drive back to my apartment.
I have these heart-pounding memories of afternoons of not-enough, not-enough, of rapid-fire talking, of nights when we would stay up until dawn buzzed, awaiting the crash. This was my teenagerhood, hanging out with grown men, taking in questionable substances, risking, risking, knowing at that point, after all hell had broken loose and no one seemed to notice, that no one would pull me out of it. I had to rely on myself (and as soon as I left the Eastern Shore, I left all of this life behind), but what I really wanted was someone to rescue me. I wanted -- I needed -- a parent.
After writing the post on Thanksgiving marking the day of my first son’s birth and death, a day that I dwelt on internally but discussed very little in my real life, I realized that it is up to me to heed the events and emotions that are important to me. No parent is going to suddenly materialize in my life to take things over. No one will suddenly see into my soul, will contain and heal me with some kind of magic love. To expect other people to hold my troubles and tragedies in their hearts and minds, to anticipate my internal state without a word from me, to heal me by becoming a surrogate parent, is expecting too much. There are some experiences that I must hold alone. It isn’t that I don't share my troubles or expect to be supported emotionally. But when it comes to healing, to understanding my past and how I got here, I am in many ways on my own. It's a slow process, this solitary piecing together of a healed self, but necessary. There are no shortcuts.
So I accept the occasional re-emergence of the past. It is a cue from my subconscious to pay attention to the present, to examine my expectations, to push myself forward to a better place. And the scenes come up so clean and clear, like I experienced them just last week, that they are hard to resist, life in all its color when I lived life on the edge.
Image by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon Mistress.
From two prompts, one a photo (above) and the other "the lines."
Home with a sick boy today, after being up since 3:30 a.m.
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