Dry spell
06 June 2011 06:08 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Then her stories went, or her understanding of them disappeared. The past that she had mined so well and for too long fell away. Turned out everyone in it, the villains, the protagonists, hell, even the animals, would have benefited from therapy, from antidepressants, from a little change in perspective. That would have changed everything, the group sessions with her mother, Kevin, her father and stepmother, the circle in the room with uncomfortable chairs and threadbare carpet, her balancing a quiet newborn on her knee because he would have been saved, too, killed by the darkness as he was.
And the present, too, the latest catastrophe after years of drought, of careful control? That could have been prevented with the right mix of drug and talk. She pictures herself in a stiff satin cloak, the collar high, her dress underneath of soft linen, distributing medication to the masses, to those who are trapped by circumstance, to the stressed, to the withdrawn, to the self-medicators slack-jawed and satiated with sex or drugs or hours in front of the television.
The need to create in her dried up. Her imagination withered. There were no more scenarios of 1 a.m. shooting galleries or people thin with want, want of love or attention or drugs. Sex became as theoretically simple as writing instructions on a piece of paper, robbed of its darker elements, robbed of subtlety and play.
Still. She wants to hold on to feeling better, so let’s not go there, ‘k? See, she’s fine, she’s good. She just slept almost 8 hours. She woke up without obsession. She is reading books. She is talking more with her husband. Every morning she has hot amaranth with blueberries and almonds. Fried foods no longer appeal. She’s healthy, she’s returning to herself – hello, self – and isn’t that enough?
Let’s let the two of them get reacquainted. Then it’s back to work. The darkness will always be there, the stories (newly shaped, someone else’s) will return. And she still feels the struggle within, hidden by newfound contentment.
From the prompt "It closed." I'm feeling insipid these days, at least as far as writing is concerned, with a trace of Pollyanna tossed into the rest of it. Maybe I just need to be in the moment of feeling good with the realization that more work remains -- because it does.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by ifijay.
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