Friday, April 2, 2010

a switch to writing, i guess

This is a story primarily composed in my head during an adventure I had after deciding I needed to piss somewhere that wasn't my own (or preferably any) bathroom.


I sat in my room making tiny screaming noises for an hour. Objections, mostly. I was trying to read a book; it was too much for me. The words meant so much and I wanted to mean as much as these words. All I could make were noises, grunts, interjections. Standalone sounds that carried nothing, and reached no one with that cargo. I'd been working hard for two weeks and suddenly there was nowhere left to move. There was just where I was with my life to sit and stare in the eye. To yell at. To make loud, incoherent objections to. I knew the next door would open soon enough and I'd be swept along my way, carrying stuff along, leaving stuff behind, moving along peacefully, if hurriedly. But there was this moment to deal with. A large imposing moment to just sit in a room with, to stare at. Of course, there were windows. I didn't have to wait in here for the door to open. I could wait out there. Would anything be out there? More moments, likely. Bad decisions that would take me to more rooms that kept me waiting. But I was tired of taking my room and dealing with it. So I climbed out.

I dragged myself through the window. "What's even out there that's so important?" I kept asking. "Anything! Come on," was the only reply, repeated no matter how strongly I demanded more details, more specifics. It was a void, it was a complete void and there was nowhere to draw any enthusiasm from, not even a stone to squeeze, but some manic click in my brain had made this the most important thing in the world, and I dropped out from the window and ran. I couldn't tell where the ground was, couldn't feel anything meeting my feet, I could just feel motion, motion was the only thing out here. There was a sense of motion in this void that, for all its discernable details, was not in that room. This was what I wanted, it was motion. Indiscriminate motion. If I was falling or running I didn't know, I could have learned how to fly and couldn't have told you the difference. It was a sense that I was not where I had been the moment before, regardless of whether those two places could be distinguished from each other.

I soon wanted to move more and more, my desire far exceeded my physical capabilities, distorted as they were in this void. My body began to convulse; limbs jerking into grotesque positions. I wanted to reshape myself, to have my physical shape climb around into something more expressive, something more free. I was losing control; vines were growing inside my body and moving it themselves in ways I could never, ways I only felt vague urges to move that I could never understand. Their grip tightened as I relaxed myself into their motions. They began to grip my brain, squeezing it as my body writhed, as though I was in agony, which I wouldn't have been able to tell; the part of my brain that would have told if I were in agony clicked off long ago. It squeezed my brain until I'd never be able to think again. Until I'd just move. In whatever manner was compelling.

I realized as my body twisted that I could now create freely. I could shape the void, it could be what I needed it to be. It was hills, and grass. Funny shaped hills, green, speckled with plants. My twitching slowed as I laid in the grass, just looking. Seeing everything, all of this formed around me to be perfect. There was something I needed back in that room, some reason I had needed to go on, to progress. Maybe I could find it here? Maybe it could be found wherever I wanted to look. This was a happier place to look, did that mean anything? There was just this calling, this compulsion to return. I would be late. I would miss everything. It would slip away while I thought of it from here. I had stepped out too far. It was a decision, between here and there. Things weren't even bad there, when it was moving. Here was for the standstills. Here the moment unravelled itself comfortably instead of staring me in the eye, glaring.

It was okay to go back, in the end. All I had to remember was to grab on to that motion when I stopped moving. To be ready for the decision to move again to what was needed.

1 comment:

  1. i love the visceral response i get from your work. you're so expressive :D

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