just some prose
I think knowing that I restrained myself from titling this post “prose before hoes,” will make me look better in your eyes.
I did my undergrad in Fiction Writing which, I always joke, I was never very good at. I just really liked doing it. When I’ve come across stories that I wrote, I always cringe because they sound like…well, they sound like a melodramatic 21-year-old with little to no responsibility wrote them. Sure, they have moments of “good,” but for the most part they suck and I always get an urge to contact my undergraduate professors and apologize for making them read yet another story in which the protagonist guzzles a bottle of wine and then offs herself because heartbreak and stuff.
While I still write fairly often here and other places, I don’t journal, which seems to be a common de rigeur activity for people who identify as writers. Every once in awhile, I’ll jot something down, but it seems like I don’t really care to write if I won’t have an audience. Not sure why that is. And when I do slip into some prose now and then, I like it much better than my short stories from my college days. So, I’ve improved somewhere, somehow. But it’s not an exercise that I make myself do as a matter of routine.
But every once in awhile, I’ll get that itch, and that happened the other night when I was brushing my teeth and noticed some shifts and lines in my face. I wrote a few things down about the experience and figured I may as well share them here. (Note that it was late and I was delirious, which is why it kind of sounds like the treatment for a movie called something like Fever Dream Flailing or something.)
Ahem. *taps mic*
Now, when I tilt my head just so while brushing my teeth late at night, I see a soft, grey apparition in the mirror. It takes me a second to realize that it’s not the smoke of a dream I just woke up from. Instead, it is the new murmurings of places where light has never hidden. They yawn to let the light nestle, and the puffs of its contented sighs cast a delicate haze that drifts slowly down to settle on my face. In the lines that peek back at me from the future, I am able to travel through time to some existence not yet conceived.
I’m not certain, but this misty lady seems content. I retire to bed to see if I can recreate and reshape this trip in my dreams.
February 6th, 2012 at 10:03 pm
I wrote about something similar and was surprised to hear you have a hard time looking back on your writings, as I do, too. Here’s the link to my post, if you care to read it, and maybe it’s something we all go through. http://twogirlsandaroad.com/2010/04/20/the-truth-in-fiction/