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It's my hardest, but it still doesn't quite work. I suck.
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1. Rain runs in a bead down the window, briefly lit in gold and orange as it passes the streetlight outside. It collides with another raindrop, and together, with twice the force, they speed out of the light, onto the dark part of the window, where, reflected darkly in his youth, a boy stands staring at himself, looking into his own eyes.
His eyes are brown and deep the way oceans are deep. The colours change imperceptibly and with fragility, the way colour is in flowers and sunsets. Thick black strands of hair fall into them like curtains. He’s looking at this, looking into his own eyes, trying to make a decision, probably the most important decision he’s had to make so far. Out of the window, currently clad in black, lies leafy middle class England, and it’s this he wants to run away from.
His reasons to stay here at home are numerous. It would be far easier – here he has free food, somewhere to live, and all his friends. He’s spent his whole life here, he is very very comfortable. Everything is provided for him, he just has to go to collage and learn things.
But they’re precisely the reasons he wants to leave. Humans are at a strange point in their history. In any other time period, this boy would be working on a farm, or down a mine, or he’d be struggling to find his own food. Now, for the first time ever, people are trying to adapt to the idea of having free time. ‘Leisure time’. The idea of choice is a new concept, in the grand scheme of things, and it is confusing many people. Including this boy, who is now drawing the curtains, leaving them slightly open so just a slim blade of light cuts across the room.
Tearing himself away from his reflection, he picks up his rucksack from his bed and swings it over his shoulder. He walks out of the room, shutting the door softly behind him, and creeps down the stairs, leaving his room suddenly empty, a monument to the son that was lost. The single sliver of light hits the opposite wall and, we see, illuminates a letter blu-tacked to the wall, scrawled in a girls hand.
2.
Because this is about a girl. It always is. We might be able to veil our thoughts in white, build up all these layers of pink and green and black, but at their core they’re always the red red red of love. Of sex. It’s all about these disguises, all these fake mustaches and false teeth and wigs that we throw over our natural thoughts so that we can accept them within the teaching that society forces upon us. And that, dear reader, is where we begin. With a girl.
She sits at her piano playing a light, happy melody, which sneaks up like plants from the ground and grows like vines, twisting around you until you’re trapped and bound. The piano is in a spotless, shadowless room, with with a bookcase filled with an entire set of ‘classic’ books, the ones with the orange spines, so few of which have been read.
Maria wants to be a ballet dancer. You can see it in the way her fingers move across the keys. It just looks natural, as though this is a movement that she was born doing. This isn’t because she’s a talented pianist – she’s just as good as anyone would be with 8 years of lessons – it’s just how she moves all the time. It’s effortless and graceful. The world just seems to move with her, at her beck and call. She’s one of the beautiful people.
She gets sad these days. It will hit her suddenly but softly, a fully formed depression that she can’t always fight off. It hits her now, triggered by a lull in the music that she doesn’t like much, but she always plays anyway. She thinks back to what she just played, and she realizes that she isn’t very good. Or at least, she is good, but not good enough to play professionally. This thought triggers off another, waiting there like a landmine – then what’s the point? If she can’t actually achieve anything from this, then why does she bother spending her precious, precious time on it?
These thoughts distract her, so she messes a few chords up and stops playing. Getting up from the piano, she thinks, in a blurred half-formed way, that the reason she plays is for applause. She knows that, when she’s at a piano, she can press the right keys and release canned flattery from anyone around. It’s an instant boost to her self esteem. But she doesn’t let this right into her conscious mind, her memory. And so it doesn’t hurt her ever again.
She doesn’t care about the human mind. She doesn’t care about the nature of human conciousness. She doesn’t care about existentialism, or Marxism, or politics, or gay rights, or global warming. She cares about what’s on TV tonight. She cares about clothes. She cares about food. She cares about things that affect her, tangible, real things.
She doesn’t dwell on that niggling feeling at the back of her mind, the one that is always there, that something is wrong with the world. And if she doesn’t think about it, then it does not worry her.
Her name is Maria.
Outside, it’s a rainy early evening in summer. It’s been one of those summers that never really existed, where the sun would come out for a few days then receed, leaving the average weather behind. Maria wonders why everybody gets so worked up about summer. It’s just the same. She likes it (or, at least, pretends to) because there’s no school.
3.
The beautiful people. I hate them.
They told me I was the best. The teachers, the parents. Everyone. They all said that I was the best. The smartest. They all lied.
I was never the best. I was just the strangest. I was the weirdo. And I always have been, no matter how much I’ve tried to fight it.
I just enjoyed Maths, so I worked hard at it. And they all told me I was special, and I liked that. Because I never felt special.
So I worked harder so I could be more special. So that I could pretend for just a bit. And I started to believe it, that I was special. But then everyone else overtook me.
The beautiful people are the best.
Goddamit, just tell me I’m clever and artistic and special and just good, and I’ll love you forever. Please please please fall for my disguise, because I need to be liked. It’s the depression at the back of my mind that is always there, always triggered.
I can cover it up sometimes, but it’s always there. My happiness is always false.
I try and try and try but still lose.
----
1. Rain runs in a bead down the window, briefly lit in gold and orange as it passes the streetlight outside. It collides with another raindrop, and together, with twice the force, they speed out of the light, onto the dark part of the window, where, reflected darkly in his youth, a boy stands staring at himself, looking into his own eyes.
His eyes are brown and deep the way oceans are deep. The colours change imperceptibly and with fragility, the way colour is in flowers and sunsets. Thick black strands of hair fall into them like curtains. He’s looking at this, looking into his own eyes, trying to make a decision, probably the most important decision he’s had to make so far. Out of the window, currently clad in black, lies leafy middle class England, and it’s this he wants to run away from.
His reasons to stay here at home are numerous. It would be far easier – here he has free food, somewhere to live, and all his friends. He’s spent his whole life here, he is very very comfortable. Everything is provided for him, he just has to go to collage and learn things.
But they’re precisely the reasons he wants to leave. Humans are at a strange point in their history. In any other time period, this boy would be working on a farm, or down a mine, or he’d be struggling to find his own food. Now, for the first time ever, people are trying to adapt to the idea of having free time. ‘Leisure time’. The idea of choice is a new concept, in the grand scheme of things, and it is confusing many people. Including this boy, who is now drawing the curtains, leaving them slightly open so just a slim blade of light cuts across the room.
Tearing himself away from his reflection, he picks up his rucksack from his bed and swings it over his shoulder. He walks out of the room, shutting the door softly behind him, and creeps down the stairs, leaving his room suddenly empty, a monument to the son that was lost. The single sliver of light hits the opposite wall and, we see, illuminates a letter blu-tacked to the wall, scrawled in a girls hand.
2.
Because this is about a girl. It always is. We might be able to veil our thoughts in white, build up all these layers of pink and green and black, but at their core they’re always the red red red of love. Of sex. It’s all about these disguises, all these fake mustaches and false teeth and wigs that we throw over our natural thoughts so that we can accept them within the teaching that society forces upon us. And that, dear reader, is where we begin. With a girl.
She sits at her piano playing a light, happy melody, which sneaks up like plants from the ground and grows like vines, twisting around you until you’re trapped and bound. The piano is in a spotless, shadowless room, with with a bookcase filled with an entire set of ‘classic’ books, the ones with the orange spines, so few of which have been read.
Maria wants to be a ballet dancer. You can see it in the way her fingers move across the keys. It just looks natural, as though this is a movement that she was born doing. This isn’t because she’s a talented pianist – she’s just as good as anyone would be with 8 years of lessons – it’s just how she moves all the time. It’s effortless and graceful. The world just seems to move with her, at her beck and call. She’s one of the beautiful people.
She gets sad these days. It will hit her suddenly but softly, a fully formed depression that she can’t always fight off. It hits her now, triggered by a lull in the music that she doesn’t like much, but she always plays anyway. She thinks back to what she just played, and she realizes that she isn’t very good. Or at least, she is good, but not good enough to play professionally. This thought triggers off another, waiting there like a landmine – then what’s the point? If she can’t actually achieve anything from this, then why does she bother spending her precious, precious time on it?
These thoughts distract her, so she messes a few chords up and stops playing. Getting up from the piano, she thinks, in a blurred half-formed way, that the reason she plays is for applause. She knows that, when she’s at a piano, she can press the right keys and release canned flattery from anyone around. It’s an instant boost to her self esteem. But she doesn’t let this right into her conscious mind, her memory. And so it doesn’t hurt her ever again.
She doesn’t care about the human mind. She doesn’t care about the nature of human conciousness. She doesn’t care about existentialism, or Marxism, or politics, or gay rights, or global warming. She cares about what’s on TV tonight. She cares about clothes. She cares about food. She cares about things that affect her, tangible, real things.
She doesn’t dwell on that niggling feeling at the back of her mind, the one that is always there, that something is wrong with the world. And if she doesn’t think about it, then it does not worry her.
Her name is Maria.
Outside, it’s a rainy early evening in summer. It’s been one of those summers that never really existed, where the sun would come out for a few days then receed, leaving the average weather behind. Maria wonders why everybody gets so worked up about summer. It’s just the same. She likes it (or, at least, pretends to) because there’s no school.
3.
The beautiful people. I hate them.
They told me I was the best. The teachers, the parents. Everyone. They all said that I was the best. The smartest. They all lied.
I was never the best. I was just the strangest. I was the weirdo. And I always have been, no matter how much I’ve tried to fight it.
I just enjoyed Maths, so I worked hard at it. And they all told me I was special, and I liked that. Because I never felt special.
So I worked harder so I could be more special. So that I could pretend for just a bit. And I started to believe it, that I was special. But then everyone else overtook me.
The beautiful people are the best.
Goddamit, just tell me I’m clever and artistic and special and just good, and I’ll love you forever. Please please please fall for my disguise, because I need to be liked. It’s the depression at the back of my mind that is always there, always triggered.
I can cover it up sometimes, but it’s always there. My happiness is always false.
I try and try and try but still lose.
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Okay, thanks for that, I now have a feel for what I assume will be the three main characters. I'll wait patiently for their interaction but don't believe for one minute I'll forget this thread and let it die :)
Been busy. This is just a little bit more.
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Grey feels like he’s underwater a lot of the time. He feels like everything he thinks is like light from the surface, hopelessly distorted by the time it gets to him. His thoughts seem like music that fills the surface above him with beautiful melody, but underwater the sound’s all muffled. He can see traces of the beauty, but he just can’t feel it.
The other thing about being underwater is the pressure. Grey is under pressure from the things in his head, a crushing pressure that distorts the inside of his mind, changes how he thinks. The things in his head…he doesn’t know how they got there, but he just wishes they’d go away. They’re not dramatic, like schezophenia or anything serious. They’re pathetic and tiny, things that he sometimes thinks might not exist.
They’re things like purity. Some days, when Grey doesn’t feel like he’s underwater, he feels like it’s the hottest day in summer in his head. These days tend to be ones when he has nothing to do. He feels like there’s this stifling air inside his skull, a air that stops his thoughts moving, thick but not black, transparent, and he gets stuck thinking the same stupid things over again.
A fellow marcher, drenched and angry, catches Greys eye. Although this may not have been the reason for the marcher looking at him, Grey realizes that he’s got lost in his thoughts again. He hasn’t been thinking about East Timor. So, guilty because he’s not angry, he goes through the slideshow in his mind, the one of the dead bodies, all the negative bad things. But he’s thought about these too many times, and the mutilated pictures have no effect on him any more. He’s used to them, they’re background.
Having failed to make himself feel any real anger, Grey pretends. He’s good at pretending. To anybody else, the outside world, he looks really really angry about what’s happening in East Timor.
---
Grey feels like he’s underwater a lot of the time. He feels like everything he thinks is like light from the surface, hopelessly distorted by the time it gets to him. His thoughts seem like music that fills the surface above him with beautiful melody, but underwater the sound’s all muffled. He can see traces of the beauty, but he just can’t feel it.
The other thing about being underwater is the pressure. Grey is under pressure from the things in his head, a crushing pressure that distorts the inside of his mind, changes how he thinks. The things in his head…he doesn’t know how they got there, but he just wishes they’d go away. They’re not dramatic, like schezophenia or anything serious. They’re pathetic and tiny, things that he sometimes thinks might not exist.
They’re things like purity. Some days, when Grey doesn’t feel like he’s underwater, he feels like it’s the hottest day in summer in his head. These days tend to be ones when he has nothing to do. He feels like there’s this stifling air inside his skull, a air that stops his thoughts moving, thick but not black, transparent, and he gets stuck thinking the same stupid things over again.
A fellow marcher, drenched and angry, catches Greys eye. Although this may not have been the reason for the marcher looking at him, Grey realizes that he’s got lost in his thoughts again. He hasn’t been thinking about East Timor. So, guilty because he’s not angry, he goes through the slideshow in his mind, the one of the dead bodies, all the negative bad things. But he’s thought about these too many times, and the mutilated pictures have no effect on him any more. He’s used to them, they’re background.
Having failed to make himself feel any real anger, Grey pretends. He’s good at pretending. To anybody else, the outside world, he looks really really angry about what’s happening in East Timor.
Agree, need more, still not sated.
More dammit, I want more! This is developing into something really rather interesting...
Sounds like the beginnings of a big story. Tis good.
Is that three characters you've introduced? I ask this because you haven't named the first character.
I've tired to write long stories, but I can't do it. I always myself bringing things to a conclusion. I can't help it. So I've decided that all I can write is short stories, very short stories. Snapshots.
Is that three characters you've introduced? I ask this because you haven't named the first character.
I've tired to write long stories, but I can't do it. I always myself bringing things to a conclusion. I can't help it. So I've decided that all I can write is short stories, very short stories. Snapshots.
Ignore anything past 'Her name is Maria' on the other one.
---
Her name is Maria. She has pretty green eyes.
Maria dreams about flowers and dirty faces that know when she’s lying. She dreams of turtle shells and lanterns that dance to her music. She dreams about days when it rains diamonds, endless seas of them falling from the sky, sprinkeling the seas and rivers, creating a million different ripples for a million different reasons. She dreams about white dogs that cry and about a boy with solar eclipse in his eyes.
But these things that seem so alive at night seem like ghosts in the day, burnt to ash by the sunlight and blown away by the lightest of breezes. The days bleed childish thoughts of their magic until they seem limp and pathetic, all the flesh stripped off and just the exposed bare bones left behind, the dreams condensed creuly into words so inadaquate.
Every morning Maria hears todays war come through from the television, rumbeling through the walls like an invisible army. When she was smaller, these things used to scare her. She used to be able to feel sorry for these people on the screen, with the horrible flies crawling all ove their face, into their eyes. Those eyes with a sadness that she could never comprehend contained in them. The kind of eyes you didn’t want to get behind. But you can get used to the most vile things if you’re exposed to them often enough. The dead and dying people on the screen are like furniture now. They’re just there, and if something’s there for long enough you don’t think about it. It just is, and, to Maria, that is just how the world is.
But she still hates the flies, on a level she knows not to think about. But her response is no longer to try to help these people, as it used to be. She doesn’t look into the eyes. She usually changes the channel.
3. Grey can smell the smoke in his hair. The rain releases it. Sometimes he thinks that you must be able to see it rising off him like a chimney, thick and black. Thick and black. How he’d love to be thick and black.
Grey knows there are better places to be than London on a Saturday afternoon. There are warm places, places where you could shelter from the rain that has been pouring down solidly for two hours. There are things to do that don’t involve marching and shouting for a cause that no-body will ever care about of take notice of. Today, it’s East Timor. Next week, it’s Syria. Grey spends half of his life marching and shouting, and the other half wishing that he was thick and black.
If he was thick he wouldn’t have to care about things like this. People dieing would just be something to tut over in the newspaper, before rolling over and going back to sleep. No, if he was thick he wouldn’t even read the newspaper. He’d watch cartoons. God, how he wishes he could enjoy watching cartoons. How he wishes that he could be like them. Happy. He pretends to be happy now, but he’s not. He can’t be, not if he’s clever. Not if he has a concisce. You can’t be good and happy.
---
Her name is Maria. She has pretty green eyes.
Maria dreams about flowers and dirty faces that know when she’s lying. She dreams of turtle shells and lanterns that dance to her music. She dreams about days when it rains diamonds, endless seas of them falling from the sky, sprinkeling the seas and rivers, creating a million different ripples for a million different reasons. She dreams about white dogs that cry and about a boy with solar eclipse in his eyes.
But these things that seem so alive at night seem like ghosts in the day, burnt to ash by the sunlight and blown away by the lightest of breezes. The days bleed childish thoughts of their magic until they seem limp and pathetic, all the flesh stripped off and just the exposed bare bones left behind, the dreams condensed creuly into words so inadaquate.
Every morning Maria hears todays war come through from the television, rumbeling through the walls like an invisible army. When she was smaller, these things used to scare her. She used to be able to feel sorry for these people on the screen, with the horrible flies crawling all ove their face, into their eyes. Those eyes with a sadness that she could never comprehend contained in them. The kind of eyes you didn’t want to get behind. But you can get used to the most vile things if you’re exposed to them often enough. The dead and dying people on the screen are like furniture now. They’re just there, and if something’s there for long enough you don’t think about it. It just is, and, to Maria, that is just how the world is.
But she still hates the flies, on a level she knows not to think about. But her response is no longer to try to help these people, as it used to be. She doesn’t look into the eyes. She usually changes the channel.
3. Grey can smell the smoke in his hair. The rain releases it. Sometimes he thinks that you must be able to see it rising off him like a chimney, thick and black. Thick and black. How he’d love to be thick and black.
Grey knows there are better places to be than London on a Saturday afternoon. There are warm places, places where you could shelter from the rain that has been pouring down solidly for two hours. There are things to do that don’t involve marching and shouting for a cause that no-body will ever care about of take notice of. Today, it’s East Timor. Next week, it’s Syria. Grey spends half of his life marching and shouting, and the other half wishing that he was thick and black.
If he was thick he wouldn’t have to care about things like this. People dieing would just be something to tut over in the newspaper, before rolling over and going back to sleep. No, if he was thick he wouldn’t even read the newspaper. He’d watch cartoons. God, how he wishes he could enjoy watching cartoons. How he wishes that he could be like them. Happy. He pretends to be happy now, but he’s not. He can’t be, not if he’s clever. Not if he has a concisce. You can’t be good and happy.
Don't listen to the demon Doubt; don't let it stiffle.
This is a good start to a story. I like it.
This is a good start to a story. I like it.
RastaBillySkank wrote:
>
> And heh at Maria. Does she come from Nashville with a suitcase in her
> hand? :-)
Of course...every girl in every story I write is called Maria. Ta for the nice words, I will write some more. The 3. I wrote while drunk, just before I posted this, and it completely wrecks any rhythm I might have had up until them. So ignore it.
So yeah, no promises, but if I ever do anything more to this I'll put it here if you want.
>
> And heh at Maria. Does she come from Nashville with a suitcase in her
> hand? :-)
Of course...every girl in every story I write is called Maria. Ta for the nice words, I will write some more. The 3. I wrote while drunk, just before I posted this, and it completely wrecks any rhythm I might have had up until them. So ignore it.
So yeah, no promises, but if I ever do anything more to this I'll put it here if you want.
Is 3. a third character or is it the thoughts of the first character?
I'd like to read some more as well to see where it is going so please continue.
I'd like to read some more as well to see where it is going so please continue.
Cheese, you don't suck at stories. Keep writing this. I'm intrigued already...
And heh at Maria. Does she come from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand? :-)
And heh at Maria. Does she come from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand? :-)
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