I start a lot of stories. I wouldn’t say I write a lot of stories, though, because I rarely finish them. I get excited about an idea and I blast through a few thousand words a day for about a week, and then I get bored of the writing. Maybe it’s because I just write from the top of my head. I suppose if I actually took the time to make notes and write down ideas, I might be able to stick with it long enough to finish. Then again, Steinbeck did that crap all the time and people still loved his books.
In any case, I thought I’d share an excerpt from something I was working on. Maybe if it sparks some interest in you, my faithful readers (yes, both of you), it will inspire me to take up the yarn again.
Anyhow, forgive the formatting, as WordPress makes it nearly impossible to retain indents.
“Jackson.” I knew who had said my name without turning around. The voice, while familiar, was laced with malice. This was exactly what I was afraid of.
“Coop,” I said by way of a greeting as I turned to face him. Matt Cooper had been one of the people I had enjoyed working with the most. To some he might have seemed like an asshole, but I usually found his antics pretty amusing. I hadn’t talked to him since I’d been fired, though. The guy standing in front of me seemed like an entirely different person.
He looked the same, for the most part. But there was something in his eyes, something gleeful and yet somehow terrifying. I’d never been intimidated by Coop before, even though he was a good six inches taller than me. This time was different. The way he was looking at me now scared the hell out of me. He smiled and I nearly turned around and bolted out the door.
“What are you doing here, bud?” He was acting normal, nice even. But something just wasn’t right. “You looking for your old lady?”
“Coop, do you know where she is? Have you heard something?” I was almost hopeful. Then he grinned, put his hand on my shoulder, and leaned in close.
“Oh yeah, I know where she is.” I wasn’t expecting it, so when his fist came crashing into my gut, the force of it knocked the wind out of me and I fell to my knees, hanging my head in breathless agony. He brought his leg up sharply and drove his knee into my nose. There was a sickening crack as the bridge gave way under the force. My eyes welled up and blurred as blood ran down my lips, my chin, dripping onto the floor. The pain of it was huge and consuming, but it was nothing compared to how it felt to hear his next words. “And you will never see her again.”
* * * * *
I remember blood. I remember tears. What I don’t remember is how I ended up in the parking lot, slumped against the side of my car in a heap of agony under swiftly darkening skies. Hadn’t the sun been shining when I went in? I remember the wind that had been blowing.
My face was a mess of sickly yellow and purple with a layer of red crusted blood over the top of it. My left eye was swollen almost completely closed. My bottom lip was split and still trickling blood.
Pain exploded in my ribs as I tried to stand up. There was definitely something broken there. I collapsed to the asphalt again. The ground was cold and unforgiving, and my body hurt all over.
Overhead, the sky had darkened considerably. There were thick, purple clouds blocking the sun, and it was getting colder by the minute. I’d never seen a storm blow in this fast before. Then again, I don’t think I’d ever felt this kind of wind before either. From the looks of it, Winchester Lake was about to be buried under a heavy layer of snow.
Regardless of what Coop had told me, I wasn’t going to give up. I had to find her, to find out why she had called me here and then disappeared. I couldn’t ignore the feeling that she still needed my help.
But I wasn’t going to be any help to anybody lying in a parking lot under three feet of snow. With a lot of grunting and groaning, I was able to drag myself up from the pavement. Getting the car door open lit flashes behind my eyes as the pain of my broken ribs threatened to drive me to the ground again.
I fell into the car and laid across the bench seat, trying to catch my breath. I was spared a good 15 minutes of agony when the wind blew the door closed. I could hear it howling outside, like an invisible beast, clawing at my car.
It was getting darker and darker, and this time it had nothing to do with the clouds. The color was fading from the world in front of my eyes. The first snowflakes, fat and heavy, began to fall as I passed out. Then all was dark.
* * * * *
There were dreams of machines and monsters. Some where the machines were monsters, others where the monsters were machines. They were faint and distant, but one dream was horribly vivid.
I was in an empty white room and she was there. I couldn’t see her, but her voice was unmistakable. Over and over I could hear her whispering my name. But the room was huge and it seemed like her voice was coming from everywhere at once.
I would run for what seemed like miles, following her voice only to find myself facing a wall. Each time I came to a wall, the whispering would fade and I could hear a steady beeping. Some places the walls were so thin that the beeping pounded in my ears and I could see light and movement through the plaster.
On the other side were bulky shapes with sharp corners that hummed. These appeared to be the source of the beeping. The movement was barely more than flitting shadows, but I could feel something or someone there. I tried to break through where the wall seemed thinnest. I punched and pounded until my fists were bloody, but the only thing that got through the wall was that beeping and the occasional whisper of my name.
Eventually the room started to feel smaller and smaller, and it became cold. I could see my breath as I panted, nearly exhausted from running and beating myself against the walls. The beeping was getting louder and there was a new sound to go with it. It was loud and the ground rumbled with it.
It was a familiar noise that I was sure I had heard before, but I couldn’t place it. Something metallic, something like stone, scraping and grinding. And the beeping! The noises became so loud it was terrifying. It wasn’t until the walls shook with the noise that I realized exactly what it was. But a large empty room seemed like a pretty strange place for a…
* * * * *
…snow plow. I awoke with a lurch, a painful heap of cold, cracked bones. The white room of my dream was replaced by the steely interior of my car. I was still parked in front of the market, which – from the looks of it – had been closed for at least a few hours. It was dark outside, except for the faint light of the halogens that shined at the top of the three poles that dotted the parking lot.
So… yeah. For the record, though this passage involves bleeding in a parking lot, this story is not related to the one I posted a section from in a previous entry. I guess I just like the idea of agony and asphalt.
My life sucks. I know people say that a lot, and for a lot of people it’s a load of crap. Some people are just dissatisfied with certain aspects of their life and therefor use the blanket statement, “My life sucks.” Some people cannot think of any better way to voice their unhappiness with their life. They lack the proper command of words to articulate the thought any more accurately. But we all know that’s not the case with me. I know words. So when I say that my life sucks, it’s not because I can’t think of a better way to say it, it’s because I mean it.
Let’s break it down. What are the qualities that make life good? Money? Love? Success? Sounds good.
I have very little in the way of money. I get by, sure, but it’s not as if I am rollin’ in it. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not starving or anything, but when a person thinks of an amount of money that would mean a comfortable life, it’s certainly going to be more than I make as a struggling artist/freelance geek. Strike one against my life.
Love? That’s laughable. It’s been nearly 2 years since I even kissed a girl, let alone any kind of serious romance. In addition to that, every effort I’ve made to remedy that has run up against the cold brick wall of rejection. Strike two. Moving on.
Success. How do we measure success (aside from whether or not we have the first two)? In America, we are said to have a dream. I know people who are happy in their homes with their husband or wife and one or two kids. They are living the dream. Me? I sleep on a couch in a tiny apartment. I have no furniture to speak of. I don’t consider this to be my home. In fact, I can’t think of a place that I could call home right now. I have a place to sleep, but I don’t have somewhere to look forward to going after a long day at school or whatever. I am homeless in that aspect. So, no wife, no kids, no house, no job, no picket fence. Strike three.
Like I said, my life sucks. So what, you may ask, was the point of this post? Am I just feeling sorry for myself? Is it a pity party? Am I looking for sympathy? Hell no. Quite the opposite in fact. I’m talking about staying positive. I don’t let the fact that my life sucks bring me down.
Most of my free time is spent surrounded by a cloud of negativity that I’ve been trying to get rid of. That’s not who I want to be. When you let every little thing spin you into a panic attack, all you do is waste time. Well, to hell with that. I want to waste time the way I want to waste it: doing stupid things that make me happy. Not moping. Not crying. Not wallowing in self-pity.
So my life sucks, big deal! It’s better than no life at all. I’ve never had any kind of spiritual epiphany or anything. I’m not thanking God for keeping me alive. I don’t have any use for that nonsense. My life sucks, but I am happy because I choose to be.
Sometimes there is too much in my head. I have a thousand ideas an hour, most of them bad. Most of the time, my brain is running on overdrive, which plays hell on the filter between it and my mouth. I spend a lot of time thinking of stuff, especially when I should be sleeping. Or drawing. I really should be drawing right now.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my life analyzing decisions. Not just considering them, but actually going over every outcome I can possibly think of. I turn each option over and over in my head, inspecting it for holes, trying to determine which choice will result in the least amount of misery. What kind of way is that to live?
I have a logical mind. I’m not saying I’m an unemotional Terminator or anything, but I tend to make choices based not on feelings but on logic. In my experience, girls have done the opposite, which has caused many many problems. It’s not that I think decisions based on emotion are badly made, I just don’t understand that process. But sometimes I wonder if maybe I would sleep better if I just went with my gut more often and didn’t spend so much time fretting over possibilities.
Food for thought, I suppose. As if I didn’t have enough to think about already.
So, I have all these big plans to write a lot. But most of the time I can’t think of anything to say, hence the lack of posts on my blog. But I figured maybe people reading this (yes, all three of you!) might be interested in my other writing as well as all the witty things I have to say about things that nobody actually cares about.
So here is an excerpt from a story I am working on. There’s no title yet, and it’s far from finished, but here are a handful of paragraphs that might be interesting.
So, this is what it feels like. In all the years I spent doing this job, I never really stopped to think about what it must feel like. Sure, I thought about it in the psychological sense – the fear, the realization of the inevitable, the regret – but not the physical sensation of it. I don’t like it one bit. Some might call it some sort of poetic justice, me being made to feel something I’ve caused hundreds of times and finding it not to my liking. Those who believe in a god – or should I say God? – or Heaven and Hell, might say that he or she had planned this. Maybe as a result of my life’s work, or maybe from the day I was born. I don’t believe in that nonsense. If I did, I probably couldn’t do what I do for a living, and I probably couldn’t have done this. No, this isn’t divine retribution. This is a choice, my choice, in fact.
They say a person’s life flashes before their eyes right before they die. If that’s true, I’ve been chauffeur to more than my fair share of trips down memory lane. I was like a modern-day Ralph Edwards, there to say, “This is your life.” Then again, maybe it’s different for everybody. Some might have quick flashes of the good times, others might see only the things they wish they could have done differently. I may be an expert on the subject, but even I can’t say what goes through everybody’s mind in the instant before they die.
As I lay here – my blood darkening the pavement as it pools around pebbles and cigarette butts, various bits of debris – I see the history of this place in the garbage that litters the ground. I see how this parking lot has lasted years, through the tortures of bad weather, countless tires rolling and shoes pounding. All the misery that this bit of land has seen, the winos sleeping under their newspaper blankets, the broken glass from bottles cast aside, the bloodstains that I am, at this very moment, adding to; all of it has changed what was once a bright new bit of asphalt and concrete. It’s something darker now, something ugly.
The thought of it, the sight of my blood, brings to mind memories of my own life. The garbage that has settled in the corners of the parking lot is a mirror of the darkness that has collected in the corners of not just my soul, but my body itself. This place was dying from the minute it was built, just as we are all dying from the moment we are born. Some of us quicker than others, of course, some with my help. It’s not happening in a flash, like they say. Then again, when you’re dying slowly in a dirty parking lot, your life has the luxury of taking its time to pass before your eyes.
How very fitting that in my dying moments I am treated to my own reminder of the life I lived. What goes around comes around, they say it and it’s true.
More to come later.
It’s amazing the things we find when going through our My Documents folder: old photos, addresses of long lost friends, an updated résumé from each year for the past handful, and my personal favorite: song lyrics that we wrote when we were younger. And yes, I just used a colon within a list of things following a colon. And yes, I also just started some sentences with and. It’s my blog, I’ll do what I want.
Where was I? Ah, yes, the old song lyrics. Not to be confused with the old poetry. I know better than to keep any of that. But the lyrics, I actually kept those because I had aspirations of someday being a successful musician, or at the very least, an unknown songwriter behind some successful musician. So far I’m 0 for 2 on that, but whatever.
I came across a text file when I was going through My Documents that was simply called irreplaceable.txt. I was immediately intrigued. What was irreplaceable? Did I have the secret to the universe in a text file on my hard drive? Nah, just a crappy old song I wrote at some point in the last 15 years.
For your reading enjoyment, I have included the contents of said file below (the formatting has been preserved, including angsty lowercase i’s):
i’ve got a million things to say to you, if you’d only come around
it’s been a long time since you’ve shown your face
you must’ve found someone new to drag you downi guess i wasn’t good enough, i couldn’t live up to your standards
all your silent screams and muted pleas were just whispered words i never heardyou can blame me for your broken life, but i know it wasn’t me
i did everything i could for you, but i wasn’t what you wanted me to be
did you ever think about how i felt? did you give it any thought?
i tried my best to be worth your love, but i can’t be something that i’m notwell i don’t need you now, i never needed you then
i keep telling myself that again and again
i don’t miss you now, i won’t miss you at all
i’d tell you just that if you’d ever call…
Yeah, pretty deep lyrics, Tom.
Now, I do have to be honest: I actually didn’t cringe when I read it. It’s got some clever lines. But here’s the best part: I don’t even remember who it’s about. I don’t mean that as a slight to any of the girls from my past. It’s more of a statement about me.
See, I must have been affected pretty deeply by this mystery woman, otherwise why would I write about her? But now, who knows? I guess it’s true what they say about time healing all wounds.
It’s funny, to me, how we see things, and how that point of view changes over the years. Permanent scars actually do fade. Holes in our hearts close up and we become whole again, ready for the next big love to open new wounds. In 10 years, how will I look back on my most recent love and how it imploded? I don’t have any cryptically named text files full of lyrics about this one. Maybe I should write some and revisit them in a decade.
We were all kids once, right? We all did stupid things. We all lived without the benefit of the wisdom of experience, aside from that of our parents. And of course, when we were kids, we cared nothing for the experience of our parents.
I had a conversation, the other day, with somebody I used to know. I would call her an old friend now, but at the time, she was somebody I used to know. At one point during our very pleasant dialog, she apologized. She said she was sorry for how she acted when we were younger.
She apologized for behavior from over a decade ago. For something I had already forgiven and forgotten. After all, we were just kids.
It got me thinking. At what point in life do we leave behind the sins of our past? There must be a time when we become adults and all the stupid things we did can be chalked up as kids being kids. Or is there no statute of limitations on the actions of children?
I like to think that I’ve grown up and left that behind me. But speaking with her, it makes me wonder: is there something that I should apologize to somebody for?