untitled

I’m sorry that I can’t hug you back some days.  It’s not that I don’t want to because sometimes all I can think of is the comfort that comes with being held by you.

I’m sorry that sometimes I can’t hold your hand and that I shake when we kiss.  My fingers always ache to be twined with yours and my heart pounds happily when our lips connect, but I’m still so scared that this will disappear.

 I’m sorry that I fall apart at times and that my lows are sometimes too low and that I laugh when it’s inappropriate.  I know it embarrasses you sometimes, it embarrasses me sometimes too, but they’re few and far between now and when they do happen I close my eyes and hold my breath and it hurts less.

I’m sorry that sometimes you intimidate me and that at other times I break down and shut you out.  I don’t have an excuse for it, but I hope to always see you standing there when I finally open the door.

Gesture

To Be or Not To Be (The Unspoken Question)

“So,” Ethan says and his voice trembles a little, like he knows exactly what I’m about to tell him, and maybe he does.  Maybe I’m not as good at pretending as I like to believe.

I reach for my wine glass and his eyes follow the path, widening slightly even before I’ve pressed the thin curve of glass to my lip.  But on contact they catch my own gaze, questioning and it’s then that I know he knows.  He’s always been so observant.  It’s what made me fall in love with him and it’s what makes me frustrated with him now.  It just seems so obvious.

Everything feels that way though.  Like the way he combs his hair to the right to hide the miniscule recession of hair or the way he hums some unrecognizable tune when he washes the dishes.  Because he washes the dishes.  Or the way he bites at his cuticles when there’s something he’s dying to tell me but just can’t because he’s terribly shy.  I thought I loved these things.

But I know him too well now and the small habits and ticks that I used to find endearing only serve to wear at my patience.  And I think that maybe it’s because he knows that I know what each little gesture means.  I know that his fingers are raw and bleeding around the nails because he’s dying to ask me if it’s true.  If the little stick with the little pink plus sign that was somehow sticking out of the wads of tear-stained tissues is true.

But that question got filed away and stored for a later time when I reached for the wine glass.  The rim is cool and slick against my lip and I remember the article in Cosmo that said to use your drink as a prop for attracting men.  But this isn’t a game of whether or not Ethan loves me, because I’ve known that since he whispered it against my neck three months ago when he thought I was sleeping and two weeks after that when he said it clearly across the table at our favorite diner.  This is about something that he wants to talk about and that I don’t and this wine glass is the answer.  Just a tilt will do, just the smallest incline to send the bittersweet liquid across my palate and down my throat.  Just the smallest angle will send fire down to the pit of my stomach and will explain what I cannot.  That I cannot do this now.  That I am not as strong as he believes me to be.  That this kind of thing is for other people and that I’m not ready to be the woman he thinks he loves.

But Ethan doesn’t play by the rules.  So when I start to move the glass just ever so slightly he breaks and asks, “Will you keep it?”

I hesitate.

Dream Story

Hole Punched Moons and Missing Stars

This is a house.  This is the window and this is the little red door and these are the three and a half floors that reach up to the blue blue sky.  This is the orange couch with ugly brown stripes that lives in the den like a tiger.  It curls itself around the wall and breathes deeply but shallowly.  Hick hick hick every time someone rubs their fingers through its fur.  Hick hick hick with the small bites that each touch leaves in its wake.  It opens its eyes, foggy and baleful with old age and yawns with a wide-toothed smile that would be fearsome if it weren’t so cracked and worn with age.

This is the rug that greets your toes and tickles your heels and kisses your arches and says Welcome Welcome Welcome.  It used to say bah but the couch got really hungry a long time ago and felt neglected and went straight for the jugular, so to speak, of the shag pillows in the study.  But that was a long time ago and the grudge has long since passed, though they stay separated.  It would hurt too much for either of them to be in the same room now.  It’s just too much to ask of anyone.  So now the couch growls sometimes in its sleep and thinks of soft warm things when it dreams at night in its den and the rug counts its brothers and sisters to go to sleep each night.

This is Olivia.  This is her house.  This is her window and her little red door and her three and a half floors that scrape some of the blue off of the beautiful sky.  This is her purple hair, cut short in an awkward bob that curls at the apples of her cheeks.  This is her orange hair, long and flowing and pin straight.  It grazes against her back and creates an itch between her shoulder blades and she just reaches around with her long long arms and scratches it. 

This is Chip and this is Daniel and they live with Olivia and they are her friends.  They used to be her brothers but then something happened.  Something important that she can’t remember but it left everything in ruins except for this house.  This house with the orange door and no windows and seven floors that rip through the red sky and leave it tattered around the edges.

Chip lives in the den with the tiger and he pets it occasionally and it goes hick hick hick but he doesn’t mean to hurt it.  It’s just that sometimes he forgets.  He lives in the den with the tiger and the tan carpet that have splotches of green from the bad thing that happened that nobody can remember anymore and Daniel explained it once.  He said they were water spots, like the ones you find in the ceiling when it rains too much except that the spots are on the ground now because the water is slowly coming up from below now instead of from above.

Daniel lives in the study with a lone shag pillow and his laptop and his wire-rimmed glasses and his sweaters and he stays there until the sun goes down.  Until the red sky that’s torn in places and worn-out in others shifts and changes and fades to purple.  He gathers it in his hands and molds it and melds it and punches a hole in it—sometimes whole, sometimes half, and sometimes somewhere in between—and puts it all back up where it belongs.  Sometimes he forgets to punch a hole at all though and then the sky is very dark.

This is Olivia’s room, which is very much the same as the one she had before the bad thing but is somehow different.  Things seem less concrete now.  If she presses her hand to the wall it caves in on her hand, like those foam pillows that she played with the other day at the  mall while her parents picked out a new mattress for the guest room but they’re not here now and neither is the mattress.  She has a small bed that is pushed up against the wall and a radio and a clock that goes tick tick tick almost like the tiger downstairs but not quite.  She has two windows and she looks out of these and watches Daniel make the sky and the moon and never stars and wonders how it was things used to be.  A ringing starts in her ears and she thinks that maybe she’s thinking too hard on certain things but somebody has to now that they’re the only people left.  It stays that way for a while though and she feels out of place, like something is dragging her to the surface and now she can’t breathe and she wants to stay in this world of purple skies and hole-punched moons and tigers and sheep but then Daniel looks up from the yard and says Wake up Wake up Wake up and Olivia opens her eyes.

Dialogue

On a Staircase in a Museum in Chicago

“So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“What do you mean about what?  About the painting, of course.”

“I don’t know Elle, what do you want me to think about it?”

“Well don’t you have any opinion?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.  I like the colors.  They’re very striking.  They make me want to open up my soul and tell you absolutely everything about myself.  Things I swore I’d never share with anyone else.”

“You’re a dick, Jason.”

“They’re a bunch of clouds, Elle.  It’s just a canvas painted blue with streaks of white that blend together towards the top.”

“It’s an O’Keefe.”

“It’s a waste.  Oh don’t give me that look.”

“Care to elaborate then?”

“It’s a waste of paint, of canvas, of space, of my time.  Stop sighing, you asked me to explain.”

“I just don’t get you anymore.”

“It’s a painting.”

“It’s an O’Keefe.”

“It’s just an opinion.”

“But it’s your opinion.

“And what does that have to do with anything?”

“It has to do with everything!”

“This isn’t about the painting, is it?  Oh don’t cry.  At least not here.  Let’s just move to the side and—”

“No.  No we’re not pushing this to the side again!”

“Elle—”

“No!  You will not be embarrassed of me and you will not push our problems under the rug again.”

“Problems?  What problems are we having?  I’m sorry that I don’t like the cloud painting.  I just don’t get it.”

“You don’t get anything that I like!  That’s the problem!”

“Elle, please, calm down.  This is a museum.  People are looking.  I’m sorry.  Okay?  I’m sorry.  But I love you.  I wouldn’t have given you this ring if—”

“Let go of me.”

“I’m sorry.  What I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t have given it to you if I didn’t love you.  If I didn’t want to marry you, Elle.  I want to make this work.”

“I… I…”

“Oh, Elle, don’t do that.  Please, please don’t do that.”

“Take it back.  I can’t marry you.  I can’t do this anymore.”

“Please.”

“Take it.”

“I can’t believe this.  You’re leaving me because of a painting.”

“It’s an O’Keefe.”

How to Not Fall in Love

How to Not Fall in Love

Don’t look at him.  Don’t notice the color of his eyes or the way his smile goes all crooked to the right or the really light almost invisible freckles spattered across his nose.  Don’t do this unless you absolutely positively have no other choice.  Make sure to remember this when you’re first introduced.  Looking in between the brows generally does the trick.

Don’t be friends.  Don’t find the things you have in common or count them towards your chances because everyone has things in common and everyone stands a chance if you let them.  It’s not unique.  Be sure to keep this in mind when he asks you what kind of music you like to listen to.  Just because you both like Coldplay doesn’t mean he wants to hold your hand.

Don’t give him your phone number and definitely don’t ask for his.  Don’t let the butterflies come to life in the pit of your stomach the first time his name shows up on the small screen and don’t let your voice crack when you try to nonchalantly answer with the ever popular “Hey what’s up?”.  If it comes to this point make it clear that you are and will always be busy.  The extra minutes you spend with him on the other end are not worth the nickels and dimes you shake from your old piggy bank that you keep stuffed in the back of your closet.

Don’t spend Friday nights on his couch talking about the smallest details of your mundane life when you could be out with friends.  Don’t tell him about how you feel abandoned sometimes because the people who you grow closest to seem to leave for different places and different people and don’t listen to him when he says he won’t leave you.  He doesn’t mean it the way you want him to and you can’t get back the hours of sleep you lose from thinking about those four simple words.

Don’t make him a mixtape that spells out exactly how you feel and that has all the songs from all the memorable moments the two of you have ever shared.  Don’t think he’ll appreciate or understand it or call you at two in the morning to suddenly air out the mutual feelings that have been sitting heavily in the air between you for the past few months.  They don’t exist.  At least not for him.  The only person who’ll actually listen to the mix anyway is you.

Don’t analyze every little movement at the movie theater.  His knee touching yours is not a secret code that means “I want to be with you,” and the way your knuckles graze each other when you both reach for the popcorn is only a testament to the fact that you should have bought your own bag.

Don’t cry into your pillow the night he starts seeing the girl from the math class you are both in.  Don’t imagine what it would be like to be in her shoes.  Don’t think about how their first kiss (on the front steps of the school) should have been yours while you wait impatiently to walk home with him.  Don’t let the chaos ripping through your body start to tear at your chest and don’t let the tears creep up into your eyes when he finally turns and smiles at you with the friendly grin and not the one that she always gets now.  The shuddering breaths that leak from your chest will only make it worse.

Don’t let him in on what’s got you down.  Don’t pour your heart out and let all the desperation and frustration and humiliation trickle into your voice when you tell him that this wasn’t how things were supposed to be.  Don’t let him know that your heart was his from the start because he won’t know what to do with it and he certainly can’t keep it.  Don’t tell him the feelings and thoughts that have been echoing and bouncing around the walls in your head for days weeks months years.  Don’t say it and you won’t feel it.

254 Words

...is the length of this sentence (an assignment for creative writing):

Don’t tell me everything is going to be alright because it’s not going to be the same with only photographs to remind me of your smile, with only phone calls and emails and instant messages to get us by until I can fly over and see your blue eyes again; I can barely remember now the way they shine when you find something entertaining, like the time that you and I climbed a tree and I freaked out (you remember that, right?) and was afraid to come down and you stood there with both feet on the ground, smiling up at me and your eyes just sparkled and (this is cliché isn’t it? It’s so cliché) I kind of, sort of, might have lost my breath just a little; but that’s not important, what’s important is that you are leaving me (I don’t mean that in the we were dating and now you don’t want to anymore  kind of way, because we never were, that’d be silly, it’d be so silly) for another state, another school, another friend to confide in and share stupid moments in trees with and who will probably be a lot cooler than me; she’ll probably be really artsy and actually be good at it and you’ll probably have a whole lot in common; and then maybe one day you’ll call me up and tell me you miss me because she won’t be your friend anymore she’ll be something more and I won’t be able to say anything at all.

Something Light and Something Heavy

so the prompt for this was to write a poem to something, rather than someone. I tried different things but ended on this while in my stats lecture yesterday.

Ode to a Pilot Precise V5 RT

To my mighty sword
and the way your ink glides so smoothly
over my notebook paper
singing praise and prose and poetry
instead of the math notes
I should be taking.

To my wielder of words
may your ink never run dry
so long as I have melodious messages,
fantastical phrases, symbolic sentences
and the occasionally atrocious alliteration
to tattoo to this page.

My faithful friend,
you've stayed with me through the joy,
the despair, the hope,
and the many journals of teenage angst
that still sit (albeit haphazardly stacked and stowed away)
at the top of my closet.

This is for you, my beloved ballpoint.
In remembrance of the scribbled notes you’ve helped me create,
the love-addled poems you’ve aided in forming,
my miscellaneous lists and chicken-scratch notes.
O! I thank you, my eloquent ally,
For the permanence with which you stain the page.


This prompt was to write a story based on the style O'Brien uses in The Things They Carried. Basically, create a character (or characters) and talk about the things (literal or figurative) that they carry. So... yeah.

It was an accident

Geoff carries his daughter in his arms and bites down on his lip to stop the scream that’s threatening to burst from his chest. Her lifeless form is limp and heavy in his hold and his muscles strain slightly but he does not notice. He will not put her down.

The future that she was meant to have flits through his mind like a dove. Except that now that it has been captured, it never sings. This realization rips through Geoff like a knife: at first an acute, unbearable pain that leaves in its wake a constant and unceasing ache. A persistent reminder that he continues to exist when his reason for living does not cry or laugh or smile or love anymore. That her small fingers will never reach out in search of his again. That their arguments about cars and boyfriends and curfews have been stolen from them and cannot be replaced.

Geoff thinks of these things as he shuffles forward away from the crowd of loved ones. Away from Elisa, who hasn’t spoken to him since the accident. Since the squeal of tires as he hit the brakes and the wide blue eyes in his rearview mirror and the scream that never came. “I can’t bear to look at you,” she says to him two days after. But he doesn’t think of this. He thinks of the way her hair fell against the pavement and the hopscotch drawn sloppily on the driveway as he carries the shovel, full with the soft, heavy dirt to the hole that is too large and too deep for his child. He turns it and hears the earth patter against the coffin six feet deep and feels the familiar pull in his muscles that will always belong to his baby girl.

Geoff carries the little yellow ribbon she had in her hair that day in his left front pocket. He never forgets about it, but sometimes its weightlessness allows its existence to slip from his mind. His fingers tangle in it an hour later when he searches for a quarter and guilt accompanies heartache when he remembers it again. He rubs it between his thumb and index finger, trying to burn its presence into his memory. But like the shade of her eyes, it starts to slip away the minute he stops focusing on it.

Geoff doesn’t have to carry Elisa’s suitcase because a different man (taller, and with darker hair) already has it in his hand when Geoff arrives home from work one Tuesday evening. He isn’t jealous. He isn’t even upset because he expected this to happen months ago. After all, what kind of woman could bear to be near the man who killed her child? Let alone live with him, sleep with him, cook for him day in and day out. It was too much to ask of anyone. So sixth months after the day she vocalized the terror their five-year-old daughter could not, the words “I’m leaving you,” had already lost their effect.

Geoff carries the picture of Elisa and him and their beautiful baby girl in the worn leather wallet that was a birthday present from so many years past. He still wears his wedding band on his left finger, its weight a dull, but painful reminder that he once had things that meant more than life itself. He sits in his empty house that once made memories but now only holds their remainders and cobwebs. The sunlight is bright like his baby’s eyes used to be. The way the world seemed to be. Before it stopped spinning altogether and the brightest star in his life suddenly winked out.

But above all else, Geoff carries the guilt. His shoulders cave from its weight. His breathing is pained and short from the constant pressure it creates. But he does not shrug it off. It is his to bear and he does so willingly, waiting for the day that nature sees fit to return him to his shining star.



Thanks for reading.
Maggie

A Brief Introduction and An Even Shorter Explanation

This is my blog for short stories, poems, and prose that I write. What I hope to gain from this is constructive criticism in order to grow. I'm looking at this like a giant exercise and the hope is to write something daily, though realistically it may be more like 3 or 4 times a week. So tell me what you like, what you hate, what you don't understand, and what you think I can do to improve on specific things. I really appreciate it.

I'm doing this with the small (and vain) hope of getting published someday. Also the title (Write It!) refers to Bishop's One Art, and is normally interpreted as an urging statement to write that which is hardest to write.

So thank you to all who may participate in the future and for taking the time to read this in general.

Sincerely,
Maggie