Rigmawrole
I do admit, I haven't done too much fiction writing lately, other than writeups for animations. I was sincerely tempted to sign up for the summer creative writing course offered to alumni at my undergraduate institute, just to make myself get back into it... but then the little bird called Pride whispered to me, hey, you should be able to do it yourself. So that's what I'm going to try this summer.
In the meantime, though, here's something I wrote a few years ago. In the tail end of undergrad. I'll warn you, it's strange and confusing. But then, I was a strange and confusing undergrad...
The Weight of It
There was the time, you see, with what we called āthe apartment forest.ā I use the phrase, but should add that translation does no justice to the scenery I recall. I mean, not that the scene is much on beauty; Iām not about to complain about lost attraction. Thereās really no standard appeal to it at all. Itās just, well, associated with the wrong imagery. Itās not a forest. Itās a ⦠itās more, well, loosely laid. Airier?
And apartment is the wrong word too. Apartment in the language Iām writing in here is not a foreign word. Itās not history-shallow, itās not strictly contemporaryāat least not in the way it should beāand itās certainly not, normative, as it should be. Nor as, liberating, as it should be. If thatās the word.
What Iām saying is, itās all wrong, the way it is now.
And you shouldnāt ask me what it is, because then Iāll have to say something odd. Like, itās all the wrong color.
Once my mind gets there I canāt really stop going at it, of course. Itās like a mind puzzle. And at first I think itās just language. Because any reasonable command over a second language, or even the study of the native tongue, wonāt fail to state that the fragility of dictionaries lies in that there is no explanation to any word aside from itself.
We think apple means š︎, until you realize itās not. Itās actually a pointer to the bible too. And mythology. And itās 500+ granny-somethings and color-deliciouses. Go overseas and thereās one š︎. Thereās no religious allusion; instead, itās a symbol of health and prettiness. Because itās red. And sweet. The end.
But hey, thatās not apple.
Itās š︎.
So itās what language does.
Or so I think, until I wonder, maybe, is language what it does, instead? Itās kind of the chicken-egg problem, except the actual chicken-egg is easy. Dinosaurs before chickens, so eggs came way earlier. A chicken had to be before it could reliably make more chickens. But a chicken could be made by chance. Right?
Maybe thatās the explanation. There was, by chance, a place that contained someone. And that someone had to find a way to refer to it, so another someone in the same placeāor, arguably I guess, a similar spaceācould catch on. So language happened.
But language isnāt a chicken. Especially if it is an egg.
Or so I say.
It must be the lighting; itās all lit the wrong way.
But what can I do? Iām not about to use 132 words to fail to describe something that can be said in three. (One, actually; itās three when itās translated, but we donāt use articles, and we like to merge words. So itās like, apartmentforest. Hmmm. Does that help, I wonder?) For the social creatures that we are, actual sharing of anything significant is immeasurably challenging. Itās a paradox.
It rained, somewhat briefly, the day I walked to school. Itās a month ago. Though it feels like longer, and the man-made nature of the way we count time permits me to call it last year. The rain felt so right, as I was without an umbrella and it was exactly how it was supposed to be. It wasnāt raining hard, but it was raining; none of the fancy words, like drizzling, or spitting, or finely misty, would do. It was like gentle conversation, how it rains in British Columbia. It is what rain is, in B. C.
Except to those for whom it isnāt. Then itās not.
But I was who I was, wearing something water-resistant that was slowly getting soggier and soggier, as I went down the hill, and it was thanks to the rain that things didnāt get frightening too quickly. I was still able to go through the metal fence that now surrounded the blue buildingāwas it always blue? I couldnāt recallāand be detained at the office for not having made a visiting appointment, but to discover my teacher walking across the hall in salmon PJs. I re-noticed the white board; this particular Monday was a wear-pjs-to-school day. I managed to holler out to her and be sneaked into her classroom. She had class pictures up her corner. She had two per year; now she had fourteen. Seven rows.
Mrs. S retired, she said. You should send her an email.
I was busy enough for the rest of winter to postpone further returns.
I call myself a writer, and I call myself an artist, but cannot un-realize that everything that matters is just my thought of it, in the end. Itās just me, and itās just for me. And itās that terrible loneliness which catches me breathless in the mornings, and chases off weary slumber long after the lights go out. Itās humbling at times and devastating at others, and itās the only thing that so potently stills the pen.
Itās at such times, that I turn to what I madeānot so long ago that even the self canāt not have lost contactāand see if I can catch glimpses of it between the lines. Because sometimes I can: my words that describe the darkness of a quarter to three, in a town suburban enough to be well lit but mostly silent, and it was winter with a warm day after a bitter week, but it was night and so the slight layer of melted snow had frozen over, shallow puddles etched with hexagonal claws, the pavement sparkling, and heading from one place to another felt like running but walking.
And for a while I can know it: that it was brief, but it was completely, utterly, all-surroundingāthat I was, it was, being reminisced.