Windows shut.
Doors closed.
Feet slap asphalt against darkened starless sky.
Voices murmur.
Thoughts thrum.
Stained cheeks puff cascading tears that won’t dry.
Chest heaving.
Heart palpitating.
Gasps weighed in swirling crushing sigh.
Solitude beckons.
Remorse implores.
My blue neighbourhood where scarlet wrists cry.
Instagram me,
Fake smiles for a like,
Slide into my DMs,
A thousand followers for a selfie.
Dog filter my SnapChat
Ten seconds of fame,
Smiles of grandiose,
Over grey-scaled matte.
Pseduo Facebook friends,
Tweet your dreams,
Pin your interests,
Slanted life through a Tumblr lens.
Notice me,
Not the debris.
Dashing prince meets his beautiful princess
A fairytale beginning to this biographical non-fiction,
Let this ink run out before the last chapter
Happily ever after, the final words.
I may be a writer, but I’m an actor in this tale
A sub character in this paperback,
Dancing to the pen of another
Pull my arc and let it burn.
My wrists don’t bleed, but my fists do
Physical pain, throbbing satisfaction
Fool me once, shame on me
My gun doesn’t have bullets, but my words do
Bleeding pain, throbbing indignation
Fool me twice, shame on me.
I am like a puppet, pulled by invisible strings
Your love is a coin, pop it in and watch me dance.
A temporary love song, we revel in it’s beauty
And we never know when the curtain will fall,
When it does, don’t take another coin
I’m tired of pretending to be a real boy,
Dancing to the tune of your whims
Cut my strings and let me fall.
There’s no save point. No reset button.
No 1st draft to be re-written.
Can’t suture these gaping wounds
I’m letting words bleed ’til I run out of ink or blood.
Just raw un-edited words. Probably turn this into a song or something. I was going for a Panic! at the Disco / Fall Out Boy lyrical feel. Did I accomplish it? What’s your favourite band or lyrics, I would love to know.
It’s been 4 days since NaNoWriMo but a week since I wrote anything. How well did I do? I failed again. I reached 25 000 words and completed the word count with a sentence that changed the entire premise of the story. Suddenly a character sneaked in and bam, they became the center around which everything else revolved. I did not even see it coming!
So what does that mean? Do I discard what I’ve written, crawl into the fetal position and mourn over my inability to write 50 000 words in a month…again? Well that stage is already past, I’m at the “What’s next!” stage of what I like to call the “Failure to Sit Down and Write Syndrome”, symptoms include procrastination, walks to the kitchen to make coffee, excessive bathroom breaks from multiple cups of coffee, an idea that seems more fun to write etc etc. You get the gist of what I’m saying.
Congrats! You’re the owner of a new time machine. The catch? It comes in two models, each traveling one way only: the past OR the future. Which do you choose, and why?
Image courtesy of:
http://dkart71.deviantart.com/
I know this is all very late, a whole week late in fact and that’s unacceptable for the “Daily Post” tag. My previous post was also a late Daily Post but hey these ideas are gold and in all honesty I was thinking about them the day I got them it was just a matter of sitting down to write ’em out that didn’t work out so well.
The first thing I thought of when I read this post was the idea of regret. With a choice like this I don’t care about the future as much as I do about rectifying the past. So this short is about what I would do if I had a One-Way Time Machine.
_______________________
I glanced at the crack running across my phone screen and wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have gone back a bit further to prevent such an atrocity. The light from the lamp post I was parked under amplified the deep lines straggling across the surface of the screen. The fleeting thought disappeared with the darkening of my phone screen as I edged the button on the side to lock it. 5:40PM I was early. That was good, since I had a tendency of never being on time – a waste should I not arrive in time to prevent myself from doing something far more abominable than cracking my phone screen.
Now that I’ve had time to think about it, and not only see but experience the consequences of my actions, I can’t believe how stupid I was. I mean this is not even dumb preteen me or immature teen me but not thinking straight a-few-months-ago me. Was it a waste going back a few months rather than a few years and rectifying all of that? I guess you could but all those somewhat small mistakes could never truly change the bigger event that was about to happen or rather, that was happening. Are we not doomed to make those mistakes because it’s in our very nature? Ignorance? Self sufficiency. Efficacy. Training our minds to pick up signs of those particular goals and interests and regardless of what comes our way we push through until we get what we want? Well then if I deny a future version of myself and continue on this doomed path then you could say I deserved it. Destiny or a preordained event, it was all the same.
I turned the radio on. The competition that was running was familiar but more than that my ears echoed as though I was hearing it twice. My lips twitched, moved on their own,
“The answer is obviously One Direction, there is no other boy band like them duh.”
~ the answer is One Direction. Their latest single Best Song Ever… ~
“So their song is not the best song ever…I wonder what song they were listening to. Rather ironic.” My lips spoke. I realized that this was obviously my past self talking to himself on the way home. Why would I be reacting to him that way…this wasn’t something that happened in Time Travel movies. Or maybe this was the whole Personal Interaction theory that would cause the world to implode or whatever if I meet my past self. Well there was only one way to find out and that time was soon, another five minutes and my past self would be driving by; that’s when we’ll test the theory.
Sure enough five minutes later I saw my vehicle sweep around the corner at a rather unsettling rate, swerve back onto the proper lane and roll past me just as I pulled off. Music blared from the open window, an arm hung out with the hand tapping against the side of the car at the same time as the beat. Even though this was a few months ago, I felt far older than the younger man driving ahead of me. This was the moment of truth however, the changing of a past to rectify my future.
The car came to a stop outside the unpaved front entrance of a slightly dilapidated household, a familiar sight that immediately wrung my chest with anger and shame. I sped onto the grassy area, blocking his path off and leaping out the car as soon as it was at a stand still.
“What…the…”
“Listen bud, this is a big mistake. The euphoria or whatever you are feeling right now, is nothing compared to…”
“The feeling you are going to experience when all this comes crashing down.” we both finished at the same time.
“I know.” he added. Staring at myself inside the rather untidy car with papers all over the seat felt unsettling. Was this really me? Can a few months do that to someone.
“So why are you here?” I asked him
“Because I have to be…”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, time travel is a funny thing. You see, future me…us, rocked up just as I left the house, told me ‘No matter who tells you what, do what you planned to do today. You must.’ and now here you are telling me not to do it. Well, I have to listen to older more bearded me than you.”
My throat clicked as I swallowed, I could tell he could tell that my brain was working out how to process what he was saying. In my silence he continued,
“Ok. So as far as I can deduce…which we are so good at yeah… we either have this amazing ability to time travel which we discover later on, or our future selves are being given a single chance to go back in time and rectify that one thing that they assume is the worst.” He looked up at me then, and feeling his discomfort in my own discomfort, I stepped back to let him get out of the car so that we were standing facing each other. He needed a shave.
“For some weird reason, this particular day is the day that we all want to fix. Either we doom ourselves by continuing in whatever I’m supposed to do today or we doom our future selves by not doing what I’m supposed to do today. I think you will agree with me that a suffering now is better than a suffering we must both await. And judging by the message future us sent, it seems whatever he experiences is by far worse than what I’m about to experience now.” The attitude in how he said it and the rising emotion in my chest no doubt experienced by him, had my fist clench in anger at his cockiness. He continued.
“By you stopping me here, outside this particular house, I think I know what it is I’m not supposed to do which I’m going to do anyway because I’m supposed to do it to prevent future future future us from coming back here and trying to change it too.”
“Surely I can change whatever has happened!”
“We are predestined to these choices. All the smaller choices we make lead us right back here, every good and bad choice leads us here. Human responsibility or not… it’s supposed to happen.”
“When did you get so wise?” I finally said, exasperated.
“I didn’t. You’ve known this all along and have fought to change the past when you can’t. The lesson you must learn is acceptance and content. Let me go make my mistake, let me go suffer and let that teach future me a lesson he won’t forget, being stronger for it.” I looked at myself, aware of so many things all at once. He was right, of course, who would I be if every wrong I fixed was rectified? Would I be perfect? No, not when the ability to be imperfect was nestled so deeply within me that I would always have that one point in time I would want to go back to. Where then does my hope lie? What then am I to do with this irreversible past?
_______________________
Well that story is not at all what I had in my mind when I began this tale. Uhm what did you make of it? Hit me up in the comments.
In response to:
Well its the end of NaNoWriMo and all I got to show for it is an incomplete 22 166 word manuscript, some horribly written shorts and a serious guilt-ridden conscience from handing deadlines in late…again. You’d think all that pressure would bop me hard enough against the head that I’d wake up and do some proper writing but Lieutenant Lazy and Professor Procrastinator won in the end. Worst super-heroes ever.
The Novel
Junk Yard Angel continues as normal. I’m half way through the novel and the plot as I see it in my head (and on my Whiteboard at work) is moving along steadily. I have all the main events plotted and ready for my characters to arrive at them and cause the mayhem and chaos they are supposed to. You know how characters can be.
Horribly Written Shorts
None of them will ever see the light of the Blog-0-sphere! They shall forever remain hidden from thine eyes. You can look forward to some proper stuff now, including the, hopefully, long awaited Auburn short that has been on hold for quite a while now.
Guilt Ridden Conscience
My editor is one gracious guy (not trying to score brownie points here, really) and he’s had to, unfortunately, endure my *procrastinative ways which is really not fair on him, his partner and the magazine. In short, if my articles are of sub-par standard he cannot publish them and because I’ve handed them in late, there is no time to fix them and therefore the magazine is short of articles. What’s worse? Because its a gaming magazine, it has to contend with many other online magazines and one cannot Review a game a month after everybody has if one is to remain at the top. So now I aim to finish any and all writing mid-way through the month and give him and his partner enough time to read, review and if need be, return what I’ve written so that I can improve it. This writing isn’t just about me.
And now a poem.
Lieutenant Lazy and Professor Procrastinator
Lieutenant Lazy drives me crazy,
Sitting in his lazyboy chair,
feet up in the air
doesn’t give a hoot, doesn’t even care
Everything he does leaves your head hazy
Professor Procrastinator
Oh don’t even get me started
The End
_______________________________
* Procrastinative – I claim rights to this word
There is something about writing that makes my entire body restlessly ruffled up. Like a feather stuck in the ground, immovable and yet unable to prevent itself from swaying against the billowing wind. Somewhat of an oxymoron isn’t it? Immovable yet swaying? Picture that why don’t you.
Recently I’ve been going through a horrible spat of events that both inspire and dissuade me to write. At times I sit in front of the computer, begin to etch characters into the fabric of a fictional reality and feel goosebumps ooze over my arms as worlds unfold in front of my eyes then suddenly; Nothing. Just nothing. Who ARE these characters? I ask myself. This is followed by a torrent of related questions: where are they headed and why? What is their purpose? What am I trying to get to with this? What is this story actually about? And the conclusion I come to each time is; I have no idea.
Yesterday I touched on a burden of mine that has been troubling me for…well since my conversation, and the desire I have to present God in every aspect of my life including my writing has been my source of inspiration since. I find that without God, life is painfully meaningless and void; we endure life, pain, death, love and all other aspects of humanity in vain. What good is morality if in the end we as dust return to it without consequence; let the lions endure the pain of regret and the hardship of prison for the death of the zebra. Let them contemplate their purpose in life and lament over their murderous, sinful hearts. Ridiculous isn’t it? Well then ask yourself this question; What is the difference between them and us? Is it our minds? Our ability to talk? Is it because we are highly evolved animals that no longer conform to our bestial nature? No! It is because we are made in the image (likeness) of God (Gen1:26).
Creating New Worlds
Although there haven’t been any new posts on this blog for a while, this doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. I just haven’t written anything good enough that it is worth sharing here. In fact my WordPress “Posts” page has a few unpublished drafts that I have been working on. Unfortunately they all are missing the Golden Thread that weaves them together, binding them to the crux of my convictions or thoughts; they are hanging on a bare thread that is as brittle as dry twigs.
Thankfully, writing for Gamecca (a Gaming magazine) has helped keep my sword sharp and I do feel less guilty about my lack of publishing any posts. However during this continuous search for the Golden Thread and with all that I have written so far, things have began to roll into place like solving a Rubik’s cube. Previously written stories and currently drafted ideas, pieced together like a well written detective story that has started dotting its i’s and crossing its t’s. I mean this has come together so well that I’m laying out a foundation for a “new” world in which my characters will live, incorporating previously unrelated characters and events into a single environment. Just writing this and the ideas formulating in my mind as to how I’m going to go about it has me intensely excited. I already have a plausible idea for what my Golden Thread will be!
The Golden Thread
What then is the Golden Thread? It is the glue that holds everything together; the cause that drives the hero forward, the intention hidden within the villain, the inspiration that holds the village together. It is the hinge on which everything hangs; without it, all becomes naught. Love may be the Golden Thread of a romantic novel but who is the author of love? Where does the conviction that drives the actions of the “good guy” stem from? Morality? Good works? Love? Justice? Righteousness? Vengeance? Anger? They all stem from one Being who displays all these characteristics perfectly and without sin!
Where does all this lead me? Well keep on visiting the blog and you shall find out! In the mean time, may you have a glorious time worshipping the One true God…Who is One in Three persons.
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