Catch up and a writing prompt
So I barely dropped an Entrecard, didn't even go downstairs for two days, just sat in bed, didn't eat, and spend a lot of cuddling time with my son while my wonderful (and healthy!) husband took care of us and everything else.
But that's not why I'm posting. My writing class has started up again. Back to the daily prompts, thank goodness, which provides a break from harrowing memoir, gives me something else to post. Today's selection is White. The prompt is first draft, untouched, warts and all. It seemed like an especially appropriate choice for this blog, which operates in shades of grey and distrusts attempts to whitewash the past. And for another blogger's approach on colors as prompts, check out the most recent stuff at Yoga For Cynics. He's always worth a visit, no matter the topic.
White
Can you think of anything more bland? White bread, white rice, white collar. Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment, of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa. Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s sully the white.
Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.
White is too much pressure. Don’t you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and go back into the closet at the conclusion of the summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet into submission. How long were they white? By the time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey. They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my heel and toes.
“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white things, can see how writing about something muddies the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.
I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets, the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I say show it to the world, let go of your lily white fantasies.
They are totally unrealistic.