Entries Tagged 'fiction' ↓

As the other passengers board, she has second thoughts. She pauses. The line up, only steps away, seems daunting, looming even.

Vacationers, fathers returning to their daughters and sons, a grandmother who won’t have anything to do with her hands because the very existence of the terrorists means she had to pack her knitting in a suitcase and check it – they all pursue the gate, handing over their tickets and passports nonchalantly, never blinking with the kind of white-knuckled fear she feels. This is an everyday for them; and the first of the rest of her life.

What if she’s making a mistake? She knows she is. But what if she can’t undo the harm she’s causing? What if her family will never understand why she needs to do this thing, why two weeks isn’t long enough to find a new home, new everything, a new life for them? What if they only see selfishness in her actions: removing herself and her smaller unintentional partner in crimes? What if the plane crashes, like that other one did, and she never gets to set foot on that dark earth across the ocean, or once again run her hands through the hair that’s grown thick, fiercely at the nape of her daughter’s neck ever since her first hair cut? What if she returns after setting up their future, to find that they just won’t let her leave?

So many paralyzing questions, so few minutes left until the last moment she can wait.

The line is gone, and she looks at the attendant desolately, preparing herself for the words that will apologetically fall from her mouth. Deep breath in, deep breath out. No, she can’t do it. She just… can’t. Passers-by can see her struggle – it’s magnified in every wrinkle around her eyes, by the way that she keeps looking at the exit and at the entrance. It’s etched in her frozen legs. She can’t let her daughter down.

“Sorry,” she says, “I thought I forgot something, for a moment, there. Will we be leaving on time?”

I’m a week behind on NaNoWriMo. 8169 words.

I am Terra’s self-fulfilling prophesy.

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. Probably because I slept until 2:30 yesterday afternoon. Regardless, there I was at 4, 5:30, 7:30am, reading and sketching out new possibilities mentally while I absorbed the novel resting at my breasts.

By 8am, I decided that I would have to scrap what I’d written thus far, all three days of it, and start fresh.

I don’t write fiction. It gets stuck under my nails and between my teeth, leading to the kind of creative decay that precedes root canals and the type of forensic evidence that points a reader directly to my crime: a lack of attention span, the violent struggle to maintain a story without just quitting it, a murder of compositional hygiene.

I can write fiction, I just can’t finish it. I can weave plots and characters on the fly, throwing in dramatic pretense and foreshadowing at what I think are the right points, starting chapters with the correct amount of hook necessary to pull a reader further.

Then I just stop. Loose ends flap in the breeze, characters fade and become as weak as the two-week old celery in my crisper. I’m done, even though it’s not.

So, I don’t write fiction because the only kind of failure I can handle is self-created; and if I wanted to create writing failure, I’d blog somewhat unsuccessfully for five years.

Oh, wait.

So, tonight, after my newly re-energized not-a-baby-anymore baby is sleeping, and while the rest of the world is, too, and I’ve put in a respectable amount of time on the work that actually pays bills and buys food free of wheat gluten, I’ll sit down to write, from the beginning again.

Fiction, that’s not really made up.