December Thoughts

There’s a lot of looking out of windows from my side of the couch these days. A tuxedo cat nuzzles into a fuzzy white blanket, pausing sleep only to vigorously scratch her face. Cars speed as if the street was a track and time was running out. The sun is light playing on the houses across the street. The stillness is in the magnolia trees, bent over in minutes as the Santa Ana winds make their descent upon the valley.

It is getting cooler now. I descend the stairs and check the AC thermometer, making silent bets with myself. 65 degrees? 68? Sometimes the weather will trick me, playing along with my game. I’m grateful for its trickery. The mornings are cool and clean and even when the sun rises highest in the sky it doesn’t hit our apartment. Instead, it highlights the concrete but leaves us in shade. The apartment remains indifferent to the climbing heat. The cats look for warmth around our human bodies.

I miss the sound of constant airplanes now. The helicopters still search the mountains, hover like a fly over the interstate. But I cannot follow the paths of the metal birds anymore. Occasionally a cargo jet will land at an airport, low and loud, but it is nothing like the sound of bodies being thrust into the sky. I miss being in the sky. The clouds outside the window where I traced their shapes on the plexiglass.

The year ends with more of the same but we are here. We’ve kept most of our sanity. Built the necessary barriers around ourselves to keep the mischievous depressive elves at bay. Somewhat. They still find a way to sneak in when we least expect it. Baking banana bread loaves. Checking the mail. Waking up to zero notifications. They watch us. We take another moment to make ourselves resilient against the onslaught of circular thought. What better time than now? we ask. Now that we have nothing but time?

It’s December where every day is Monday, is Thursday, is the weekend. 3 pm is midnight and waking up to go back to bed. How will we be—who will we be—once things resemble normal? Will we be humans with armor or travelers lost in the woods, finally escaping after three months, sleeping on beds of twigs?

We will know soon. Hang in there.

Revisions

I am thinking a lot of revisions. Not only because I am in the third draft of my first book. It extends even further. I am at the stage where I compare life to writing, which is old hat by now. Cheesy and obvious. But that is what we writers do, isn’t it? Everything is a chance at comparison. Love is like a river. Eyes are like diamonds. A life is like a first draft that can only benefit from revision.

There is something to be said about holding your book in your hands. Or, in my case, within the electronic memory of a Kindle because save the trees and all that. It feels that much more real. Even when the book needs a major amount of work. Ignore that part for a bit. It is a feat. A miracle, almost. That we can do anything at all. Take an idea and see it to the end. That we can take something out of our head and put it out into the physical world. It’s almost unbelievable.

After reading books like Memorial by Bryan Washington and On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, I am reminded that there are so many fiction books that toe the line of non-fiction so closely that we believe it. No matter what genre shelf we find that book in. It’s incredible how we can be so willingly tricked as a reader. How we can so easily believe the architects of these books. If you were to tell me those two books, from cover to cover, were not essays, were not parts of a memoir, then it would take me a second to believe you. As a writer it is our job to manipulate—in a positive way—so much that the lines of reality are completely blurred. Once you are in our world you’ll be able to touch the walls, hear the music, see the sky, and taste the food.

Is it common for a writer to take their life, fictionalize it just a bit, and publish it as their first novel? It is the simplest way, it seems. If you have a story to tell that is true to you, that you’ve lived, why not share it? And once that first draft is done you go in with a small chisel and change the form, just enough, to make it fiction. But you haven’t taken the breath out of it. The life. After the second, third, fourth, and subsequent drafts, it may only be a skeleton of the original, but it is still just as true. In revision you’ve only opened a small gap between nonfiction and fiction. Otherwise the story is still there. You’ve still lived it.

Sometimes I wonder if fiction is only taking your past mistakes and giving yourself a second chance at making another decision, just to see if the outcome is better. Usually it isn’t. Just… different. But sometimes it can be surprising how much of a butterfly effect is created when you don’t answer the call. When you don’t meet the girl. When instead of pulling the trigger you never buy the gun. We all wish we could go back in time and do things differently. Is that all that novels are? Time machines?

In every book is a chance for the writer to engage with the reader. To share their truths, to deliver a particular message. With each draft those truths may shift so that at the end, when the book is headed out into the world, you’ve forgotten who you’ve written the book for. All you know is that you captured a moment in resin and looked at it from all sides. You’ve created a character that took that moment and did the things that you couldn’t do. With each revision we will try and make this clearer to the reader and sometimes we will fail. But that’s all a part of living. If we are kind we give ourselves a million chances to revise ourselves, even despite the deadline looming.

Time

Currently Reading:

Suzanne Collins, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Frank Bill, Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories

Currently Listening To:

Boy & Bear - Harlequin Dream

Thirty-two-years-old used to sound so old when I was younger.

I am a teenager looking up at my parents. How excited they are about things I deem the most mundane. My mother gets a bread maker, constantly wondering if her children wants bread. My father obsesses with his tools, whirring and grinding coming from the garage. My neighbors constantly are cutting the grass. It makes me wonder if the grass needs to be trimmed daily. I don’t want a part of that world, a Groundhog-Day-effect. Murder mystery parties and spaghetti dinners and cookbooks and talking about how only, if only, there were more time in the day.

All this while I swim in the shallow end, realizing that I never understood why people loved to just sit in water so much. Taking my cheap shin-splitting scooter down to the Catholic church, wondering if I could finally do the tricks I never once learned to do. All I had was time. The oyster of the world was mine.

But then you grow old. You become that dreaded 32. You see how beautiful and awesome mundanity truly is. You see things at the grocery store and wonder if you could make them yourself, grow them yourself. What is going on! Are you talking about gardening? You’d see your own mother spending half a day in the flower beds with a small shovel and printed flowers on her gloves. You’d hide just so she didn’t see you, pull you into the dirt with her. But now you are a golden 32 and you want dirt on your hands so badly. Want to eat the fruits of your labor. Hell, now you understand your mother’s obsession with making bread, don’t you? Except now you can’t find active yeast anywhere to save your life.

You’ve always loved reading but now it is an imperative. A day without reading is a day wasted. Going so far as to adding book-buying into your monthly budget. There are other things that make you realize the past just folds over on itself. You’re a child and you couldn’t care less how you are seen. But then your self-esteem becomes a double-headed dragon and you are all hair gels and mirrors. If only that period of your life rushed by quicker. Because now you are here, knowing that you’ve done as much growing as you are going to do, emotionally and physically. Have finally fit into your personality like a tailored suit. And if someone has a problem with it? Tough shit, world. You’ve spent thirty-two years to get to this point and have the scars to prove it.

So. Our life at thirty-two.

We will wake up and wonder what that new ache is all about. We aren’t going to do anything about it. What is an ache without a friend? A lonely ache. We will wonder if it is standard to brush your teeth before or after coffee, and spend a week doing either. Reading with our coffee is something we never realized would be the brightest point in our day. As long as we have that, our template is set. We’ll keep peeking at the oven. Not that we think it will explode or cook us a loaf of bread (if only). We just want to see the time, even though we have a watch on our wrist and our phone within arm’s reach. We don’t want to go to work, just like we didn’t want to go to school once. But now it’s because we feel like we don’t have enough time. We want to put a bookmark in our day as soon as possible or the bastards will take everything from us.

But we go to work. We may put on a face today that says “everything is fine” and hit it home with a wink. But more than likely we won’t even pretend. We will say our weekend was fine, didn’t do much. When in truth we did exactly what we wanted to, and it is only when “didn’t do much” hits our lips that we feel deflated by it. We read. We drank coffee. We saw a bird and it took all of our attention for two full hours. We don’t want to bookmark our days with events but it is all we can do to attempt to make time stop. If we tell others that our days were spent with useless tasks then we haven’t used our bookmarks. But what do we have to prove?

They say as you get older all you have to give is your time. Not your talent. Not your money. Your time. Because every minute spent with a task is a minute that you are giving away. This is something that we only realize as we hit twenty-five. Thirty. Thirty-two. Even more so as the decades pass. So we go outside and we find the dirt. We shovel some up and dig around, hoping for worms. We taste a smidge of it and don’t even look around to see if anyone is watching.