writing adventure 40- Next Time

     There was a silence in Sarah's roommate that Sarah didn't particularly care for.  It was like watching a bird through a closed window; the picture was incomplete without the sound, without the story.  Sarah was getting a bit fed up by it.
     "Hey," she said, sitting down at the girl's table in the crowded library.  Sarah was immediately shushed by the tables next to them, but she simply rolled her eyes and brought her attention back to the girl.
     Sarah's roommate only looked up with her deep green eyes for a moment before timidly going back to her book.
     "Okay," Sarah started, quieter this time.  "We've been living together for two weeks now, and I don't even know your name.  So, in the spirit of friendship, my name is Sarah.  What's yours?"
     The other girl closed her book slowly and looked up at Sarah.  There was a darkness in her face, a darkness that contrasted Sarah's light nature, and the silence because of it frightened both girls.  They came from different stories, and now they were supposed to coexist in a place that did not know or care about them.  It was impossible, it was a square peg and a round hole.  Sarah knew, as she looked into the other girl's eyes; the attempt was for nothing.
     "My name is Eileen," the girl said.  The friendly smile Sarah had held on her face before broadened into a dazzling grin.  Maybe not so hopeless after all.
     "Awesome," Sarah said.  In her mind, she had won and the conversation was over.  She went to leave when she felt a cold hand on her wrist.  It was Eileen.  From Sarah's almost standing position, the girl looked small, fragile, like a hummingbird blown aimlessly in a hurricane.  "What's wrong, Eileen?" she asked, trying to commit the name to memory.
     "I'm not usually like this," she whispered.  "I would have talked to you earlier, been your friend, but there are things that are affecting me now."
     "Oh!" Sarah exclaimed, and was once again shushed.  She waved her hand at the protestors.  "I'm sorry, I didn't know."  She sat again and allowed Eileen to keep hold of her arm.  Eileen looked down to her hand, but made no move to disconnect.  They were both frightened by the position they were in, but Sarah was no coward and Eileen was no recluse.  "You know," Sarah added, "you can tell me what's wrong.  I can help."
     Eileen smiled, but it was a calm and hopeless smile.  A funeral smile, fake and for someone else's benefit.  "I'm not so sure about that, Sarah.  But that's perfectly fine."
     "Look, we're friends now, and friends stay and listen.  They help.  So are you going to tell me what's wrong?"
     "Bobby."
     The silence was back again, the cloud of darkness that was locked within Eileen had come out with the boy's name.  Sarah could do nothing but stare in confusion and pity at the smaller girl.  Like how one looks at a recently deceased bird, before the reality of the situation comes to world and the flies come to the corpse.
     Eileen was just a dead little bird.
     Sarah shivered and shook off the thought.  She covered Eileen's hand with her own and asked calmly, "What happened with Bobby?"
     Eileen's eyes shot to Sarah's, as if she had forgotten her surroundings for a moment.  They were both painfully aware of the silence around them, of the eavesdroppers and gossipers mere feet away, but the flies were setting in quickly, and it was either telling now or keeping silent forever.  "I loved him," Eileen said, and her eyes were downcast again.  "I didn't love him in the way someone loves a person in the moment.  Does that make sense to you?  I had loved him forever, I had loved him in the past.  We were seventeen, and I had loved him a thousand years.  Is that possible?"
     No, Sarah thought to herself in the silence after the question.  No, it is not possible.  But this was not her story; she was only a supporting role here, and she would play the part dutifully.  "What happened with Bobby, Eileen?" she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
     Eileen was lost inside herself, though, and carried on with the story at her own pace.
     "We always talked about ourselves like that, like we were bigger than our lives, than our problems.  I told him how I felt, I told him about the thousands of years I had loved him, and he believed.  We made up stories of our romance through time.  We talked about our souls, who we were before, everything.  But Bobby," she took a shaky breath.  No more tears would come, but the dry sobs still wracked her body.  "Bobby liked to focus on the future.  He was obsessed with it.  Unhappy with this life, with this soul, he couldn't wait to meet me again, to change and be someone more important than who he was.  Maybe he had that desire all his life, but I fueled it by loving him the way I did."
     Sarah noticed now the tears were gone, but the silence had returned.  She also noticed the circles under Eileen's eyes, the sheen to her face.  The silence wasn't acceptance, Sarah realized.  The lack of tears didn't come from comfort.  Eileen was just tired.  She had flapped her wings too hard for too long and had burned out on Sarah's doorstep.  Someone had to do something about it.  Sarah went to speak, but was interrupted.
     "The cops told me it was the drugs that had made him do it, but I know why he jumped off that roof, and it wasn't because of any syringe," Eileen said suddenly, and Sarah's eyes widened.  Eileen went on.  "He had told me to come over and wait for him in his room.  I found the letter in a matter of minutes, but it didn't matter.  I didn't know where he was, didn't know where to run to, how to save him.  So I didn't.  Didn't find him, didn't run, didn't save the boy I loved, the boy who loved me.  I just sat in his room and waited.  And he jumped off the roof of the school, two miles from his house."
     Sarah was stuck in a trance, eyes wide and mouth dry.  There was nothing to say, so she said nothing, for a while, until curiosity got the best of her.  This wasn't her story, and so she was immune to the pain and reality of it.  Swallowing hard, she asked, "What did his letter say?"
     Eileen smiled the same dead, hopeless smile.  Her eyes were vacant when she looked at Sarah.  "It said: 'Next time I'll be better.'"
     "Oh."
     Eileen shoved her book aside and stood up, her eyes still devoid of emotion.  "I'm going to go now," she said, and Sarah nodded her head and let her go.
     Only after finding Eileen an hour later hanging from their dorm room fan with a note crumpled on the floor that stated 'There's no such thing as next time' did Sarah realize what the other girl must have felt like waiting in Bobby's room for him to die.

~

     Somewhere out there, a boy felt a strange stab in his chest followed by extreme sadness, but it dulled quickly, and he made no move to find out the reason it had happened.

writing adventure 39- History

     There is nothing worse, in Lance's eyes, than being a historian who has lost the meaning of it all.  He's not sure where it went, whether he misplaced it in Greek myths or medieval battlefields, but he's sure it's gone forever.  Once someone sees the light, or lack of it, there is no switch to turn on or off.
     The girl at the bar is beautiful, and she doesn't find another seat when he tells her what his profession is.  She sees something else in him, something darker, maybe, and Lance is very sure that it's the fact that he knows everything important that's ever happened and still can't find a reason why.
     "Tell me about the battles," she says, between drink number four and drink number five.  He is close to losing himself as well, and doesn't look up from his glass when he answers.
     "Battles?  Oh, battles were so important in history.  It's how history is made, really.  War moves the earth, and people love when the earth moves."  Shut up, he slurs in his own mind.  That didn't even make any sense.
     The girl giggles a bit and throws her head on his shoulder.  "Did they fight for love?" she asks.
     Lance throws her off of himself and stands, a bit wobbly but more determined than he has ever been before.  "They fought for love," he concedes.  "They fought for love, and for religion, and for honor, and for morality, and for land, and for gold, and for sons, and for daughters, and, sometimes, they fought just to fight.  But, most of all," he says, louder now, "they fought for nothing.  And then, they came home, in coffins or in drunken stupors, and their children would look on horrified at what their fathers had become.  And, after that, those same children would become the same things, and die in one way or another for the same reasons."
     It is only now that Lance realizes the woman has left and the bar is silent around him.  Most are staring at him, but a select few avert their gazes and resume their games of pool or darts.  Lance doesn't sit back down to his drink, though.  He stays standing in the dim room, standing in the spot where he finally said aloud his deepest, innermost thoughts.
     It was not as satisfying as he wished it would be.  Instead, it is hollow, and lonely.  The words tumbled out, but they did not change the past he studied.  They will not change the future he is afraid to see.
     He said the words, he fought his own soul, for nothing.  And a little piece of him died when he did, but Lance has seen it before in greater men, and he will go on with or without it.

writing adventure 38- Through a Stranger's Lands (part 2)

     The most frightening aspect of deserting the army, for Brear, was that he did not know what was going through the minds of those he left behind.  The sun was fully up, had been winking merrily at Brear for a while now, blissfully ignorant of the storm in his mind, the weight of his eyelids, the blood scattered in a clearing miles away.  He hoped that they were equally as ignorant back on the battlefield.
     He feared not being there, almost as much as he feared staying there. Paranoia washed over him in the silence and seclusion of the tall forest.  Would the army come after him?  Would he be welcomed home?  What would Kander think of his brother now, his only living role model a deserter and a coward?  Brear slumped against a tree, the bark digging into his spine.  He was afraid, and it was not a feeling a soldier should have, but he was no soldier.  He was barely a citizen.
     A criminal, that's what he had become in those few hours of morning.  He took the advice of a dead man and had run, which had in turn made him a dead man.  The sweat poured down his face, and he tried desperately to stop his shaking hands.  The attempt was in vain, and Brear sat in the forest for another hour, hands shaking and heart fluttering deep in his chest, until his eyes slipped into darkness, and he slept.

~

     Village Messer was located just outside the forest, and was not protected by any larger kingdom, even though it pledged its loyalty to a crown that believed it was entitled to the land.  There was a family name that had once been known, but Village Messer didn't care for unseen forces and famous names. Like Troxia, they simply called the kingdom "The Checkered Flag," for that was the simple crest that adorned everything the kingdom believed to be its own.  Also like Troxia, Village Messer had a checkered flag on the tallest building in the small town.
     It was almost sundown when a strange man stumbled into the tavern of the small town.  By what Elliah could gather from his cautious and curious stares, he did not know where he was and he did not trust the occupants.  She was fine with that; she barely trusted the regular customers and the place was owned by her father.
     She watched him out of the corner of her eye. The boy was lost, she knew this for sure.  He was very lost and very alone, just like anyone else who ever stumbled into her father's bar.

~

     Brear wished, more than anything else in the world, to be home.  He had found this village after walking in circles through the forest, and was immediately nostalgic for that which he left behind.  Whether he was welcomed or not, he needed to make it back to Troxia.
     He surveyed the bar closely, afraid that anyone there would suddenly recognize his face as the face of a deserter, and he would have to run for his life, just as he had earlier in the day.  He seemed to be an exceptional runner these days.  He saw the girl sitting at the bar shift uncomfortably when he passed, and took notice of her.  She had long red hair, like a blaze down her back.  If he hadn't been preoccupied with worry, Brear would have thought she was beautiful, would have asked her name and bought her a drink.  Instead, Brear asked a simple question.
     "Miss," he whispered behind her, and Elliah whipped around quickly and pretended to take in the sight of him for the first time.
     "Yes?"
     "I hope I don't alarm you by asking this, but could you tell me where we are?"
     She was taken aback for a second.  No one was ever this lost or alone.  She cleared her throat before speaking.  "We are in my father's tavern in Village Messer, one of the many small towns under The Checkered Flag."
     Brear's eyes lit up.  He didn't know the army had been this close to civilization, let alone its own kingdom.  "You mean we're within the limits of the castle?"
     Elliah paused again, confused at the young man's own confusion.  "Technically, we are not," she replied.  "This village pledges its loyalty and, in turn, the crown does not completely surrender us when the borders are threatened."
     Brear smiled, no longer fully listening.  Being near the kingdom meant being near home, but being on the outskirts meant he was practically there already.  "Can you point me in the direction of Troxia?"
     Elliah smiled.  The boy knew not where he was, she reasoned, but where he needed to be.  That calmed her mind a bit.  "Keep walking east, through the forest that lines this place, and in a day's walk you will meet Troxia's border."
     He began to run out of the tavern, but then thought better of it and came back to the girl.  "I apologize," he told her, bowing his head a bit.  "I never asked your name, or told you mine.  You have helped me a great deal yet we are still strangers."
     "My name is Elliah," she said to him, and Brear smiled at the beautiful name.
     "I am Brear."
     "Well, Brear," she said, loud enough for her father behind the bar to hear, "you can't run off before you stay the night.  My father and I will settle you in here for the night, and then you can find what you seek in Troxia."
     "Family," Brear revealed to Elliah.  "I seek family in Troxia."

writing adventure 37- Through a Stranger's Lands (part 1)

     The scream that echoed through the small sleeping town woke no one; they assumed in their dreams that it was a wolf or something equally as frightening, and so they allowed it to pass undisturbed through Troxia.
     It was no wolf. It was, in fact, a citizen of Troxia, aged seven years, being snatched from the desperate arms of his mother.
     If Troxia had woken up, had realized the crime that just occurred mere feet from their own children, they would have also heard the mother's crazed sobs for Kander–whether she meant her dead husband or kidnapped son she herself did not know. Once her mind realized both husband and son were gone, she sobbed for another boy–the one off to war, probably also dead and taken from her.
     "Brear," she cried, her hands wringing her dress. "Please come back, Brear. Please don't leave your old mother alone."

~

     Brear woke suddenly, alone in the dark hour before daybreak. He sat up under his small blanket, and his joints hurt from the cold. "Curse this place," he spat, and the men around him barely stirred from their sleep. "My mind ages one minute and my body ages ten years."

     Brear attempted to get more rest, but gave up after the wind began swirling around him, chilling anything not under the thin blanket his mother made him six months ago. Instead, he silently made his way towards the clearing a few yards from the army's campsite. It had been the site of the army's last battle, a small skirmish that amounted to no gained ground and a few dead.

     In Brear's mind, a few dead was still to many, considering the war was over mere blades of grass.
     He heard moaning in the grass and ran to the spot, his arms before him in case he fell in the dark. It was only after he stumbled and tripped over the man did he realize where was. This was the enemy's side of the battlefield. This was a man from the other side, a man dragged halfway home only to be deemed not worth the exertion. This was a dying enemy.
     Brear knelt by the man's side anyway, his eyes attempting to scan for injuries and gushing blood but finding no source in the dim and hazy light. "Hello?" Brear said, shaking the man a bit.
     The man coughed up blood before whispering back. "You must run," the man said, and took a shaky breath in before coughing again.
     Brear paused, scrutinizing the man in the darkness. "Sir, you need to rest. I will get help for you, the day is almost breaking."
     The man groaned almost angrily at Brear. "No. I will receive no help today, boy. I am a dying man, it is destiny that I die upon this ground. But you, you have time. You must not die for senseless purposes. It is not your fate to bleed here."
     "It is no one's fate to die or bleed here," Brear replied, his voice a mere whisper and his eyes searching for any sign of help. "War is no one's destiny."
     "Nonsense," the man said, and Brear could feel the man's life slipping away from him, could almost see his soul pulling itself towards the heavens. "Everyone is at war with something. For instance, you battle with the notion that it is your duty to be here, even though you say yourself no man is supposed to bleed for this cause."
     Brear paused once again. In a way, he feared this stranger, this enemy. His father told him once that the truths of the world are held only in the gaze of dying men. He never believed it until the moment dawn surfaced over the clearing and Brear could make out the man's eyes.
     The enemy took Brear's hesitation for acceptance and spoke again. "You must run, boy. You must run away from this place, because there is no peace in blood. You will lose yourself in the war, just as I have lost myself. You must never look to an army as an identifier to who you are. You must run while you have the chance."
     Seconds after speaking, the man died in Brear's arms. In an enemy's arms.
     Seconds after that, Brear deserted the army.

writing adventure 36- C.O.o.t.P.: Bagveina and Duena

This is a tie-in to a larger story I wrote, which is called Climbing Out of the Pit. It is about two young adults (about 20 in this spot) who are stuck in a world they don't wish to inhabit. One is Bagveina: a newly crowned emperor of Ickant that never wanted the throne or the responsibility that comes with it (his older brother dies and leaves the throne to him). The other is Duena: an orphan of Pittopia that goes by the code name Small One to protect a country that has given up on itself.

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     She doesn't understand. This is what he'll say when she grabs his hand and tells him he can't go. She might cry, but it will be dark and tears from hearts that he broke have never affected him before. This is different, though. He helped her when she was just an orphan, and she helped him when he was just an angry and neglected son. This frightens him, makes him question his decision to meet her. He's leaving her, knowing that she'd never do the same.

     Small One never leaves; she is a ghost tied to Pittopia, tied to a love he never fully reciprocated but could never fully forget. But he must go on, because Ickant is killing him in a way he hadn't thought possible, screaming at him to be a brother he always hated and rule a country he never loved.

     The moon scowls at him but falls gently on Duena, who is waiting by the sign that used to say "Marimba, Pittopia" but is now littered with gang signs from the EMP. She smiles at him, and they embrace, and his throat catches with the memory of the last time they were in Pittopia together. He had crossed the border as only an emperor's reckless brother, and she had saved him from the king's men.

     "I'll die before I let Jacob get to you," she had said then, and she will be right. He had told her he loved her, and she had repeated those words, but it had never been real. He always laughed right afterwards, and she always smiled with sadness and looked off into the distance. He always went back to his country above ground, and she always stayed in the Pit.

     "I'm leaving," he tells her, and doesn't watch her face fall. 

     Duena fights the urge to kiss him, embrace him, shackle him to the dirty sign, and instead says, "If that's what you need, I can make sure no one finds or follows you."

     He hesitates, but doesn't look up. "No one will find me," he says, and begins the journey back to Ickant.

     "I love you, Bagveina. Not in the way we've said before. In the way that, some days, this place means nothing to me. Some days, I want to fall asleep in your arms and stay in the east. I can't be more than a Pittopian, Bagveina, but I can love you like you need."

     He stops, and finally realizes that he is lost without her, but she is only lost when he is there. "Love," he sighs, and doesn't turn around before continuing. "You are the daughter Pittopia doesn't realize it has. I am the son Ickant doesn't realize it's killing. Tell me, Duena, where did love get us?"

     She is silent for only a second before he begins walking again, away from her.

     Maybe, he thinks–hopes, even–that two years down the road they'll be able to look at each other and not wonder if they would be happy together. Maybe he'll have someone who hasn't seen the worst of him, and she'll have someone who is better to her than he ever was. What he doesn't know is that two years from now she will take a walk and never reach her destination, and he will look up from his work and find death waiting for him as well.

writing adventure 35- For Nothing

     When faced with a stern and challenging figure, one rebels. Everything gets steadily louder, the air gets steadily more charged. Mob mentality kicks in, and one loses their morality in the crowd. There is violence, there is confusion, there is so much sound. Chaos drowns out the voices of the sane or holy. They will scream for salvation, they will cry for a hero, but the mob will only reply with louder cries that heroes live only in myth. Salvation does not exist for them anymore, nor do they want it to. Salvation, to the mob of rebellion, would mean that the challenging figure never mattered. Salvation would mean peace, but peace was trampled under their collective hooves, bloodied and killed by their new belief in war.
     But, for those suffocating under the grip of this figurehead of terror, the rebellion is never big enough, never violent enough. There is honor in the violence, honor in the way they hold their heads high even as their throats are slit. There is honor in the way they set fire to the past, even as that fire devours them, traps them in their own battle. This honor may only be an illusion, but no one in the mob will live long enough to see it that way.
     When faced with a stern and challenging figure, one rebels. And one loses regardless. No matter how many fight, no matter how much blood is spilled, they will lose. Whether it is a battlefield or a street corner, a country or court room, the mob loses their fight. They forget their morality for nothing. They forget the price of speaking out for nothing. They die for nothing.

writing adventure 34- Home

     "Hey," he said tentatively as he stood in front of the small crowd. "My name is Raymond." He coughed, and wrung his hands together.

     "Hello, Raymond."

     The fact that they were so rehearsed, so perfect as to say that line together frightened him, and he contemplated bolting. Just run, his body was telling him. Just run and get the Hell out of this place.

     He sat down instead. "Would you like to tell us why you're here, Raymond?"

     "Oh," he said, and struggled back out of the chair again. The nervous sweat running down his neck made it hard to concentrate, and the silence around him felt heavy in the air. He surveyed the small circle that seemed to get closer and farther away at the same time. There were three women and five men. None of them looked like anyone he would remember. They weren't dirty, or openly sad. They were just people. They were just strangers. He sighed, the room spinning from his panic. He closed his eyes, and the group took notice without judging, but to Raymond the air was still thick and uncomfortable. "There's this window," he said, and almost laughed at the trivial fact. The corners of his mouth twitched upward. "It's in my room, and it's this really big window, and it reminds me of this girl." Raymond's mouth stopped twitching. "This damn girl," he whispered, but still his eyes didn't open. The group waited for him to continue.

     "We were seniors in college together. I mean, we went to the same college all four years, but we met senior year. She was dating my best friend at the time. God, she was pretty. I never thought she was sexy, or hot, or anything like that, but she was pretty. She had this light brown hair that was super short, and she used to giggle at everything Eric said. Eric was my friend, by the way." His arms waved around as he told his story, but his eyes never opened. He could see it, could see her, and Eric, and late nights in computer labs.

     "Anyway," he continued, "I knew her for like three months before Eric dumped her. Said she didn't care, or something. We were seniors, and he wanted someone serious that he could marry. I never heard her side of the story, though. By that point, we were already friends, but she didn't talk about Eric anymore. I don't know if it was because Eric was right or really wrong, but I was okay with her boundaries." Raymond backed up just a little too much, and felt the plastic chair dig into his leg. He focused on the insignificant annoyance on his leg for a second before moving.

     "It had been two weeks after the break-up when she got into a car accident, right outside her dorm. After that, she wasn't pretty. I mean, she wasn't scarred or anything like that, but she wasn't the same girl. She would just sit around, staring off in the distance. Eric wasn't the same, either. Maybe seeing her like that made him realize what he could never get back, or maybe he just evolved away from me. From us. Either way, Eric was out of there." Raymond sighed again. He heard sniffles from the crowd, and resisted opening his eyes.

     "But I wasn't," he said, and his voice cracked just a small amount. "I wasn't gone. I tried so hard to get her back. We moved in together, I protected her as best I could. Every time we went out, she would look at me with these vacant eyes, this vacant heart, and she would tell me 'You should party more, Raymond.' I never drank, because someone had to keep everyone off of her, you know? She was so gone all the time, someone had to stay in the moment." The sniffling turned to cries, and his voice got louder, the tears coming down his own cheeks as well.

     "She only ever did two things: party, and stare. The partying was usually done at this tiny hole in the wall, and the staring was usually done right out my window. I used to force her to come into my room for human interaction, but she would just stare out that window."

     "Well," he added, bitterly, "she left two nights ago, and now I can't stop staring at that fucking window, either, and I hate it. And I really want to hate her too, and I think I did for a time, because who was she to define my life by what she turned into?"

     Raymond heard the screech of a chair against linoleum, and quickly opened his eyes. The girl across from him was staring straight through him, straight to his heart, and suddenly the group knew.

     "But I don't hate her," Raymond whispered, and took a step forward. "I don't hate her. I just want her home."

     The girl blinked and remembered where she was. Mascara running, she hugged herself and sat back down. "I'm trying to be better. I'm trying to be what you remember," she said to him, and the rest of the group sat in awe of the exchange between them.

     "I'm glad," Raymond said, and took another slow step, afraid she would bolt like he was thinking of doing. "But you don't have to do it without me. I'm trying too."

     "I know," she said.

     "Come home, Maya."

     Maya looked up at him, and he saw the eyes of a girl that had died six months ago in a car accident, before she got addicted to the pills that gave her relief from that trauma, before she forgot the world around her.

     Raymond looked back at her, and all she saw was home.

writing adventure 33- Amanirenas story beginning

I want to start out the story with being in the present and third person, and then move on into the rest of it, so this is pretty much what it'll be like
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     Renidas sat on the floor outside the queen's chambers. He could barely hear over the rustling of his own fabric, but he struggled to listen for signs of life. The queen was sick; in a way she had been sick since the war, since pieces of her life began to fall away. Many saw it, but no one told her they saw. Maybe that was the problem.
     The door opened and Renidas steadied himself before he fell back into the doorway.
     "You are content to sit on the floor all day, listening to my soft sighs. If I were any other woman, I'd be flattered."
     Renidas scrambled to his feet, saluted quickly, and cleared his throat. "My queen," he said. Her eyes misted up and he could almost see what she remembered– a husband, long dead, calling her that name every day of his short life.
     Amanirenas shrugged off the memory, her heart heavy and tired in her chest. She beckoned Renidas to come inside, and together they sat by the window in her master chambers. "I want to tell you something very important, Renidas," she said to him, her voice still strong even in her body's weakness.
     "Anything, my queen. I am here to listen."
     "I am going to die soon. Of course, this isn't news to anyone, but with circumstances the way they are, I must choose a successor."
     "I understand," he said, even though he didn't. Just forty-four, Amanirenas had years left in her rule, but her soul would not allow her more time.
     "I have no more family, Renidas. That was one thing the Romans did take." He studied her when she said this, and wondered if this was the same woman he met fifteen years ago. "But," she added, "when I needed a son, you were that son. When I needed a soldier, you were that soldier. And, I believe, if I ever needed a husband it would have been you."
     Renidas paled, confused. She laughed at his expression. "Don't worry, I have never loved another man but Teriteqas. I was simply stating you would have taken that punishment quite stoically."
     He smiled. "No punishment, my queen."
     "Amanirenas," she said, frustrated. Renidas saw a glimmer of what once was. "My name is Amanirenas. We will be equals soon, and that it was you shall call me."
     "Equals?"
     "Yes, Renidas. You are my successor, and now officially the crowned prince of all Kush."
     The one-time palace guard and now almost king sat dumbstruck. She was not old enough for sickness that attacks the brain, he reasoned, but still he could not believe what she had said. "Why?" he managed to choke out.
     "You were there," she stated simply. "You've heard the speeches, and seen the bloodshed. You were on that island during the treaty. There are many reasons."
     "How can a low palace guard with no blood ties follow the greatest queen Kush has ever seen?" he whispered.
     "I was far from great." Her voice was harsh and bitter. "Let me tell you what I was. Let me tell you my reign."
     "Please," he said, softening the mood. "Start from the beginning."
     Queen Amanirenas sighed, and began from the beginning. "The night was warm when my father died. . ."

writing adventure 32- Sad Songs

     She is just a collection of sad songs. That's what the music industry tells her, anyway. She is just lyrics, just tears on sheet music. She is a simple chord in a simple song.
     The magazine companies tell her she's something completely different. In their eyes, and in the eyes of her mirror, she is a collection of failed diet plans and too small bikinis. She is someone who is beautiful, but only until she flips to page forty and they tell her how to hide everything that makes her ugly.
     In a book store, though, she's a collection of romance novels. She is soft sighs and softer kisses. She is filled by dreams of someone else, someone bigger than a life of sad songs, and despicable magazines. She means something, but only to a figment of her imagination.
     She's not sure if she wants to be any of these things, but she knows that's what she is. At least, it's what they consider her to be. And maybe that's because she lets them, or maybe it's because they can't see past the thin skin she has on her body, but nevertheless she has been defined by these traits. They have made her bed, the bed she lies in now, thinking of those sad songs, and of those prettier girls, and of those imaginary boys.
     She vows that one day she'll get up out of this damn bed, and she won't ever be those things again. She'll be something that she wants to be, she'll be bigger than just a collection. She'll be human. One day.
     For now, the sad song will play, and it will make her cry over the fact that she is ugly in everyone else's eyes but that one boy's. Only he doesn't really exist.
     At least, that's what they tell her.

writing adventure 31- Remember

     He loved a girl once, but he can't remember her name, so he pretends her name is Abigail. She had beautiful blue eyes, the type of blue that seems surreal the first time it's seen, like it should only exist in picture books or the bottom of the ocean.
     He thinks he told her that, but he can't remember what her reaction was. The only thing he can remember are Abigail's eyes. They were beautiful, and a very deep blue. Had he remembered that already?
     Anyway, Abigail was pretty, but he only remembers the vague sense of her beauty, like it left an afterimage in his mind that he can't shake. He sits very still so that it will never go away. The doctors ask him to explain why he can sit so still and so silently for days, but he can't tell them. What if he opens his mouth and it goes away?
     He realizes the wall is a deep, gorgeous blue, and then he gets scared. He can't remember if her eyes were blue, or if it was just the wall that he's been imagining all this time.
     He blinks. The wall is white again. He has a small sigh of relief before he closes his mouth and resumes staring at the wall.
     This is how he remembers. He loved a girl once, but she's dead now. He thinks her name was Anna, or something with an "A" at the front. Anyway, it was a pretty name, and she had pretty eyes, and they were so blue, like the blue someone sees when they see spots in front of their eyes. He shakes his head, he wants to remember more than a color. Color doesn't matter, he thinks to himself.
     But it does matter, and his eyes tear up from staring so long. Or was that from guilt? The tears come faster. Did he really forget a girl he loved?
     The doctors come, and they ask him more questions, but he doesn't answer because the wall has turned blue again and that's scary. He doubts, and the doubting makes him want to scream, but the screaming makes him want to sit perfectly still and remember Amanda's calm blue eyes. They were calm, right until she died. He thinks she died in his arms, but he can't be certain.
     The wall is red now. He blinks, but the wall remains red and the tears remain in his eyes. He knows it means something, but his brain has forgotten so much that he can't remember a connection. Did she die a bloody death? Did she have red curtains on the window by her bed, on the window he stared out of, watching the police surround her apartment?
     The doctors blindfold him, but the red remains, and he knows now. He knows everything and nothing at the same time, and it frightens him how much he can recall. It frightens him how he killed her because he was different, because he had a disease, because she had to call the police on him when he stopped taking that medication.
     It frightens him that he had the ability to murder a girl that had such pretty blue eyes.
     The blindfold comes off. The doctors ask questions but retreat with empty notebooks. The wall is white again, and he remembers only that there was someone he knew who may have been named Alice. He can't remember why he cares.

writing adventure notice 2

So I'm going to attempt to start a new project soon.

It'll hopefully be pretty big, like Climbing Out of the Pit status (to those who know what that means) so it won't end up on the blog for a while because I'm going to write it all out first, and not do parts like I've done with some other stuff. Granted, Writing Adventure will still have little stories every once in a while like now, but I wanted to say that I'm trying something bigger so that I can be held accountable.

Here's my idea: a historical fiction piece about Amanirenas, told in first person from her point of view. In case you're not aware of who she is (I call her the greatest queen the world will never remember, which hints that not many people are aware), Amanirenas was queen of a country called Kush around 24 BCE. She was a warrior queen, and led her people against Augustus and the Roman Army, a very powerful force in that time.

I'm doing this for a couple of reasons: 1) I'm not really into first person, so it would be good to get some experience, and 2) I've never seen anyone try and write her story in a historical fiction novel or short story, and she has a tremendous story to tell.

Considering how long ago that was, there's next to nothing out there about her. So most of this story will be fiction. But, from what little information there is, one can see the tragedy that she went through. She's an inspiration, and she's inspiring me to do this. So if you see me, tell me to work on this story, because I must accomplish this!

Also, if anyone wants to Google her, you should! Then, you should get back to me with some titles!!! (I'm quite terrible at them.)

writing adventure 30- Man

     Life moved slowly, for a while. When no one was there to witness her, Life wandered aimlessly. No direction, no hurry. Time was a concept that had not been perfected by the Beasts that roamed to plains of Mother Earth, and so they were content with her lazy indifference. They let her be, let her walk in her comprehensible form in their realm, and so she, in turn, gave them eternity.
     But something happened when Man fell out of the sky. He was brazen, a menacingly curious creature that constantly wrestled with itself and its true, innocent nature. "What Beast is this, Mother?" she whispered to the winds. "Why do you allow a Beast in your realm that seeks only to destroy it?"
     "Not I," the waves of the oceans replied, crashing harmoniously against the untainted shore. The Beast of Flight fretted and took to the sky, a cowardly animal. "Man is not my Beast, not my creation. He comes from above this realm, from a place that is not my own. This is why he wrestles with the days and nights, hoping to control them."
     Life didn't understand. Beasts not mothered by the Earth? How, then, would they know what precious treasures lie before them? She walked farther from the shore to investigate. "I will see for myself," she reasoned, and almost thought she heard regret in the chaotic waves she left behind.

~

     Man's camp was in the middle of a forest he had not appreciated. She met Fox, a Beast of Land, as she neared the edge of a clearing. He seemed. . .

     . . . older. His face was weathered, his hair was thinned, and his paws were heavy and slow in the soft grass. She picked up the Beast, and he sunk breathlessly in her arms. "Who did this to you, my companion? Who has sped up time without my knowledge?"

     He did not respond, but chose to close his eyes and nestle deeper into her hold. She was now frightened. "Was it Mother? Did she take the power of time from me?"

     Fox lifted his head, and shook it as a response. Life put the frail body down, and charged deeper into the woods. 

     After a short time, she saw Man's camp. It looked dreadful; weaker branches had been ripped off of the smallest trees, and used to make some sort of shelter. "Does he not know the Mother Earth shelters all?" she cried to herself, too far from camp to be heard. "I must speak to this Beast from Nowhere!"

     As soon as she arrived in Man's camp, he emerged from his shelter, and regarded her curiously. The glint in his eye did not fade, and she tensed with apprehension. "Do you know who I am?" she asked him, her voice failing to hold steady.

     "You are Life, personified. While the Earth created this realm, you tend to it. You control its time, its  animals. This is the form you take because it is the form that looks most like," he paused, and it drew her closer to him.

     "me." 

     The trance was broken, and she looked up at his taller frame, puzzled. "I don't know what you are, but I am fashioned after no one. Mother Earth created me to rule her lands."

     "You will never again rule these lands. I come from a place higher than Earth. I will conquer time, and then I will conquer you." His rich voice frightened her, and she was reminded of Fox. This is what had happened, she thought to herself, her eyes taking in his large body. Man had tried to harness time, and it had aged the world around him.

     She narrowed her gaze. Peace, a peace she had meticulously created, had generously given to the lands of her Mother, was now ruined. "I control time, I control what happens to your soul. You will never rule these lands. You are the slowest Beast here. You can not fly, like Bird, or swim, like Whale. You question all that is around you, but not to come up with answers, just to know what questions need to be asked. You are a selfish, aggressive Beast. One that will, eventually, die."

     The air around Life grew hot then, and she began to fade. "One cannot control what one cannot comprehend," she whispered to him, and the leaves rattled her praises.

     Man felt old in that moment, and sat down to rest, wary of his sore muscles and tired eyes.

~

     Fox still sat at the edge of the clearing, hearing with his keen ears what transpired between Man and his ruler. The other Beasts wouldn't realize what he knew until it was already too late, but he was clever. Fox knew what was going to happen, what was going to change. In order for Man to be punished, time had to run as it was created to run. Meaning their bodies would no longer walk Mother Earth's plains forever.

     Fox shook his head and laid down. Too much for today, he thought. Too tired to understand.

writing adventure 29- Silence (prologue)

     It started small, his attack against the regime. He hadn't even been thinking of taking it on, really. He had just been there, had just seen the Training Center for the first time, just needed to say something to make it more real in his confused and frightened mind.
     He and his classmates (he was only fifteen at the time, a boy in a time where men lived to be over a hundred) had just been paraded around the center of the city on a field trip no one cared about. Thinking himself safe, Abbot turned to one of the others cramped beside him and said, "I think they're training us to be sheep. Look, they're leading us to slaughter right now!"
     They were supposed to giggle quietly, like they usually did when he said something funny. Instead, the girl (he'll never remember her name, but that face is seared into his memory until he dies in the same place he said those first words) turned and opened her eyes as wide as possible. She was afraid. His smile quickly faded, and he immediately looked around at the Training Center guards.
     One already had him by the arm. "Abbot Preacher," the looming figure stated, the gravelly voice solidifying Abbot's fear, "you need to come with me." He complied and let the man take him behind the stage and away from the crowd.
     (This is the first moment Abbot believes whole-heartedly he is going to die for something he said.)
     The guard shoved roughly and told him, "You will never speak ill of your homeland again. Do you understand?"
     Abbot's fear increased exponentially, but he was a boy of fifteen and so he held his ground. "It was a joke. This country has survived worse."
     The guard's helmet came off then, and it revealed a scar on the left side of his face, running from the top of his head down to his chin. Abbot sobered once again. "You're right," the guard said. "And I've survived a lot more than some dumb kid trying to prove something."
     "I was just saying what I thought. You're telling me we can't even think for ourselves? How are we supposed to be human if we can't think for ourselves?" (Funny how his mind jumped to this argument, that they needed to be human, when seconds before his death he realizes that this meaning of the word doesn't exist anymore.)
     The guard smiled at him. Abbot subconsciously shied away from the giant and towards the wooden stage. Even as he looked frantically around him, he knew there was no one there to save him, and, even if there were, they wouldn't hesitate to run the opposite direction.
     "Oh, you can think whatever you like. Anarchy, violence, the world falling around you in the shadow of your iron fist. It's when you say it out loud, when you put those thoughts into someone else's head, that's when I'll hunt you down. Just say one more thing, and I'll hang you from that rope."
     Something glazed over in the boy's heart at that moment. (Something that could have kept him alive, something that could have given him years of happiness and life.) The guard knew this had happened as well, and added to his speech, "I have a feeling this won't be the last time you're here, so just wait and see. You can talk all you want, but you can't cover up the silence."
     (Maybe if Abbot had believed that guard, he would have lived, but fifteen year old boys don't believe anyone, and Abbot died at the hands of that same guard only ten years later.)

writing adventure 28- Silence

     The rope looks almost pristine to him as he stands just inches behind it. It should, he thinks bitterly to himself, it hasn't been used in half a century.
     The crowd around his final stage had gathered there in the morning, before the criminal had even arrived. They didn't know his crime, or even his name, but they were indifferent to details. They were trained to be indifferent to details. All they knew was that the alarm bell had sounded thirteen times at seven in the morning, and that meant to get up and go towards a place most of them have never gone.
     It is called the Training Center, and it is where the man will take his last steps of protest.
     He surveys the crowd, taking the time to stare into the eyes of anyone bold enough to glance at his. He must try to get someone to see how wrong this is, he must get one out of the huddled masses to carry on. He desperately searches for that person, but anyone who has any intelligence knows what will happen if they're caught staring back, and anyone who doesn't can sense they're not supposed to look up at a dead man walking. The crowd is silent. He regards them in his mind as if they are children, and it keeps him from being ashamed at them.
     Instead, he focuses his attention back to the rope. Once the men on either side of him, the men he barely noticed before, believe that the crowd is large enough, they push him forward. He stumbles across the plank, and curses his feet. Of course his last steps on this earth would be weak.
     It is at this moment he realizes he feels fear. The sweat drips down his face and he sees the rope and where his neck will be and the fear he has suppressed through riots and speeches and government interrogations and–
     Oh God in mere minutes I will be dead.
     He looks out the crowd once more, pleadingly this time, and sees a few at the front of the group watching his feet at least. His mind, sensing such an abrupt end, takes this as his only chance.
     "If you learn anything from me," he yells, and the men beside him step back to release the platform underneath him. "If you learn anything from my standing before you here, learn to never be silent. Always speak, always be a presence."
     The crowd, nervous and trained against all he preaches about, think that the man is delirious. The prisoner must surely be joking, and so they begin to laugh.
     They laugh him to the gates of Hell.

writing adventure 27- You Know

     When you hear the phone ring, you know who you want on the other end of the line. You know whose smile you want to hear through the receiver, you know what laugh you need to be infected by.
     You also know, in that part of your mind that holds all your shadows and secrets, that it'll never be that person and, if it is, it's not what you're imagining in your head. But this part of you, this darker demon part, will never be what you listen to, and that's your downfall. You're stuck in believing, and no matter what events take place, no matter what hits you right between the eyes, you'll believe.
     And it'll sicken you, because if there's one thing you do know, it's that you're pathetic, and that you won't do a thing about it.
     So you'll answer the phone, and you'll plead with yourself to be someone else, you'll pray that the face in the mirror magically changes and that the problems that went with that face disappear too, but you'll never get that wish, and here's where your shadow place is right again. The conversation will go nothing like the one in your head, and no matter how many times you come up with the perfect thing to say, the perfect way to throw your heart at that other human being, you'll never do it. Not only do you think yourself pathetic now, but a coward as well.
     Love is what got you here, but instead of realizing that there's nothing in that phone call but voices, instead of wanting something you can actually have, you'll keep praying, and keep answering the phone with false hope.
     Because you really don't know anything at all.
  

writing adventure 26- All We Can Do (part 2)

     It is a false love they hold in their hearts now that the lovers have departed. They remember each other as they used to be, not what the earth molded them into. On his way to what he remembers as a disgusting and broken home, he imagines Leah in the faded denim shorts and oversized brown t-shirt that she always wore. He speeds up as he hits what was once Oregon state lines, trying to get to the girl that turned back for him. No amount of speed will get him to four months ago.
     She wears dark wash jeans now, from an elusive supplier in Portland, a city that has been completely overrun by a faction of the 47s, the gang that began in Victor's hometown. The jeans are new, unlike anything else she's ever slipped into or dreamed of, and she hates the feeling of coarse denim on her legs. Her small sandals thoroughly worn by the cracked cement have been replaced with combat boots, also new and manufactured miles from anywhere Leah has ever been. The brown t-shirt is gone; it was set on fire in her front yard the night Victor left. Instead, she wears nothing but a black bra underneath a black sweatshirt. Leah is also different underneath the different clothing. She is silent, she is scarred, she is something less that what she saw in the mirror four months ago. She doesn't look in mirrors anymore, afraid she'll be too ashamed of what she'll see, or too proud of it.
     Victor has changed as well. He is tired, older, but more calculating. He has seen where he must be, and knows what he must do, but he has been defeated before. He has been hit, not only by fists but by loss, and he is driven by the desire to hit back. There will be no more escapes, no more running from the plague that follows him. He has not only come for his girl, he has come for revenge.

~

     The door is open when he reaches his father's home, so he pulls his gun out from the bag on his motorcycle before he goes inside. It is night, the light from the moon and the faint memory of a childhood he barely wants to remember are the only things that guide him inside the small, one story house. Immediately, he hears shuffling, but keeps his gun lowered, forcing himself to calm down in case it's only his father. His hope turns out to be correct when the lights turn on, blinding him temporarily. When Victor opens his eyes, he drops the gun to the floor, and rushes to the older man, who is crying and laughing at the same time. They hug, and Victor feels like he's been gone for years, and remembers what Leah told him, after they hadn't seen each other for two days:

     "Everything feels like forever here, Vic. When today's all you have, it's impossible not to want to soak in each other's presence."

     Vic slowly breaks from his father. He sucks in a slow and steady breath, willing his voice not to crack when he says her name aloud for the first time in months. His father knows what he is about to say but stays silent, also knowing that he must get these words out, he must prove he's been thinking of her.

     "Leah," Victor says, and the name comes out as if it is his salvation, his water in the desert that is the entire United States. "I need to see her."

     "You just missed her actually," his father sighs, backing up to lean on the old wooden table behind him. "She's been living here, sleeping in your room. You shouldn't wait for her to come back though. You're right when you said you need to see her."

     "What do you mean by that?" Vic asks quickly, some of his old self returning as he stands in the only safe haven he's ever had.

     "She left maybe a minute before you got here, and she's on foot. Follow her to wherever she's going. Talk to her tonight, Victor. There are some things she needs to explain."

     Victor nods his head, and doesn't bother to pick up the gun on his way out. He also moves to travel on foot, and it's not long after he begins running that he sees the figure of a girl. He can't be sure it's her, but something in his heart knows that she is what he's been looking for. It's this part of his heart that also urges him to stay back; the way she's looking over her shoulder suggests she knows he's there, but Leah has never been one to reveal all her cards at once, and some things never change.

     She walks into an abandoned building he knows as 47 territory, as their leader's personal palace, and he resists the urge to vomit. This can't be her, he thinks to himself, this can't be the girl he left alone on state lines, and he is partially right in this thought.

     Victor hears but doesn't feel himself get hit in the back of the head by the butt of a rifle. He sees nothing as he hits the ground, and can hear nothing but crazed shouts as he falls unconscious.

     

    

writing adventure 25- True Love

     "This is the part where you lie and say you've missed me." Her voice is so weak and soft, and he wills himself to believe that it is only in his mind, that it is only a trick of the dim lamp post light that reveals to him her tears.

     "What if it's not a lie?" he questions back, but she'll know. No matter what he said, she always knew. It's why he hates himself for not loving her.

     "That's what I'll tell myself, too."

     He cringes away from her words, but they fall into the darkness and surround him, and he can hear her ragged breaths and sense the tears crashing to the cement no matter how tightly he shuts his eyes. They should have been soul mates, they could have been soul mates, but he has never been able to see any future, let alone one with her in it, and he can't really think of anything more than tears and darkness when it comes to the girl.

     If he were a better man, he thinks to himself, he would have taken those few steps and kissed her, just like he knew she was begging for him to do, but he is not a better man. He is only this man. He knows no true love, no three in the morning dreams of just standing next to someone long enough to feel a part of their universe.

     She knows these things, and he knows that she does and he will do nothing about it. So she will keep dreaming, and keep crying, and keep begging for things she will never have.

     "How many times have we stood here, outside someone else's house, and had this same conversation?" he asks her, realizing too late his voice is harsher than it should be to a friend he has always relied on.

     She wipes her tears violently, ready for a fight now, and he admires her ability to snap back while hating her ability to put him in this position day after day. "I don't know," she says, but her voice is still thick from holding back sobs, and it doesn't come out as angrily as she had hoped. "How many times are you going to leave without saying goodbye?"

     She stabs him in his heart with those words, with his own actions. In this moment, he feels that she is the only one who could do that to him. Only someone who loves him that much, who knows what true love feels like, could destroy him with a sentence.

     And when she turns to walk away, he will finally wonder if maybe he does love her, because why come back after no goodbye if not to see the woman he loves? Maybe they are soul mates, maybe they could be together, because he is so cold under that light alone. But the thought leaves him as quickly as it came, because he is alone under that light, and she has left, and he will not run after her, and she knows he never will.

     He is not a better man than the man he is.

writing adventure 24- Weakness

     It is in their weakest moments that she comes to them, a beacon of both light and dark. Some of them, the soldiers that die slow and painfully, call her an angel; most that only see a flash of her before the blackness simply think she is salvation.
     After an eternity of war, after an eternity of dying men, she is not quite sure what she is, but she doesn't think she's an angel and she's fairly certain she's never been salvation. When there are breaks in her work, when there are no more soldiers at the moment and no more battles in the coming moments, she remembers a time where she was something real, something human, but then there are more battles and more blood and the memory is as faded as the man's vision when he looks up at the last image he will ever see.
     As she makes her rounds on the battlefield, one of the soldiers tries to grab her ankle. He has strength, she thinks to herself, something she thinks she also had once. When she turns and kneels by his side, he looks at her as though she is the one who stabbed him, who left the spear in his chest, its wooden rod sticking straight to the heavens.
    "I can see you because I'm dying, yes?" he says to her, and she smiles her serene smile and nods her head. She has practice in this, she knows how to treat the dying.
     The tears spring from his eyes, and he claws at the dirt beneath him as he growls through his teeth. She sees both strength and weakness in the soldier, and her hands hover above his chest, unsure of what to do, of how to calm a man who knows any action is futile. "Please," she whispers, "peace will come. Peace comes to all men of chaos." She wonders at the back of her mind if, when she was real, she had clawed at the ground and screamed from desperation.
     Suddenly, the man stopped, a shadow of his former self, but a menacing one. "Peace," he responds, blood slowly dripping out of the side of his mouth. "There is no peace on this earth. It's just a temporary illusion."
     She doesn't have the chance to tell him he's right before he leaves the world he died for. Her white dress is stained by his blood, and she doesn't feel like watching anyone else die, watching someone suffer for something they either don't or shouldn't believe in. But she was human once, too, and the one thing she does remember is that no one came and sat with her as she went, and maybe that's why she got the job.
     Peace comes to those of chaos, but not for very long.
  

writing adventure 23- Stars Are Always Far Away

     You look to the horizon and you see it: the brightest lights, the biggest city, the innocent hope a child gets when they say they want to be a movie star. Then, instead of moving towards those bright lights, you falter. A life you never saw coming hits you from all sides, dampens that dream's voice until it is merely words at the back of your mind, stuck in a cage you weren't aware was waiting for them.
     Ten, twenty years down the line, you look to that horizon once again. You're still seeing lights, but they're dull and dying, flickering in and out with each breath you take, each tear that rolls down your cheek for a life you never achieved. It's a cautious, yet a desperate hope you hold with you now, a hope that is barely a whisper back in that cage. You realize that, all this time, it has been dying with the lights.
     But it doesn't matter. Reality grips you once again, and forces you to realize you are not a child, you cannot sit and waste your days staring at a horizon. Dreams are fleeting, and this is what happens when they fly away. You are left, a shell of something that was once whole, but you can't remember what that looked like. You can only see the now; the past is but a glorified and sometimes regrettable present. The future becomes the same thing.
     You move through another ten or twenty years. You sometimes sleep alone, sometimes with someone else, but you will never sleep in the city on the horizon. There is promise there, and you have no promise. You have statistics and chores, and the things that happen between dreams, and who are you to idolize dusty lights?
     When you look up, you see nothing now, save for one lonely light on the horizon, one terrible reminder that you could have been something more than yourself. But that is simply a dream, simply something to wake up from, and you've been awake all your life. The lights mean nothing, the city means nothing, but they are something to you. Something you've never gotten anywhere near. No matter what it cost you along the way, no matter what you sacrificed, there was always a horizon.
     Suddenly, you think to yourself that this must be what it feels like to go so far while knowing deep in your heart you were only running in circles.

writing adventure 22- Nightmare

     The worst part will always be the running. There's nothing philosophical to it, nothing he can cry about to a therapist. It's just so slow. He's always running and everyone is always passing him.
     And that's always the nightmare, and it's always terrifying, and he'll never understand why.
     In the dream, he wakes up under the tree in the backyard of his childhood home. The swing set is five feet away, and he ponders whether or not he should swing there, just for a moment, to regain some sense of nostalgia he knows he should have.
     He never does.
     Instead, he turns towards the horizon, the sun setting in an ominous dark orange before he sees people running up over the hill. He does not know what they are running from, be it imaginary monster or some real threat his mind has cooked up. He joins them in their escape, anyway.
     And maybe that's the worst part: the unknown chasing after him down the street, and out of town, and past county lines, and across state borders, until he's run so far he has never seen the landscape before. This also frightens him; he's so sure it's a nightmare he has yet to wake up from until he runs by places he has never seen or even thought about. Then he's sure it's real, and that he must keep running, past more state lines and more unknown places.
     He's wearing jeans and a sweater, and he's not sure he can take the desert of what he assumes is Arizona, but he runs towards it anyway, the sun still setting a burnt orange, his legs still carrying him away from something so terrible his mind won't even let him see it.
    The people that he saw running up the hill, the people that tipped him off that he too should be running, pass him as though he is a tortoise running from an avalanche. They zoom past and he is even more frightened, and even more aware that this is simply a dream.
     And now he realizes, as he runs and runs and keeps running, that that is the most frightening part.
     Not the running, not the monster, not the fact that he's never seen its face.
     The worst part is that all those people pass him, and not one of them cares that he's falling behind, falling apart, falling into the teeth of the unknown.

writing adventure 21- Absence

     Sadness did not come the night he lost her. Nothing really came that night; no tears, no shouts of frustration, no words of desperation. He had taken it in stride. He was alive, she was dead. He tried to save her, she died in his arms anyway. The words were processed logically in his brain, the actions were processed as logical as possible in his heart.
     What a damn shame that was.
     "I want to stay," she had said to him. Those were her last words, and she chose to say them to only him. She chose to look straight into his eyes, chose to stop her frail body from shaking, chose to be strong for such a short moment to say those words to him. He was who she remembered, he was who she was thinking about in those final seconds, when she told him she wanted to stay.
     "Okay," was all he could muster back.
     He hopes that somewhere in heaven she is laughing, because if she's not he knows deep down she is ashamed. She wanted that last moment to mean something; he just wanted that last moment to be over. He had never prayed for anything before, as he wasn't religious and talking to himself would be crazy. But in that moment, he prayed for it to be over. Because of her final words, he knows she did not want the same thing.
     He is ashamed of himself now, as he sits in a room he used to share with her. There is silence around him, and he makes no move to change that. There are no tears, but he tries to will them to come.
     She is dead. Her blood still soaks his clothing. Her scent still lingers on the pillow. Her warmth still lingers in his soul.
     But he is alive. And people who are alive must simply live.
     Yesterday he would not have been ashamed of that fact.

writing adventure 20- A Good Time

     Greg had been adamant about not finding some girl from a street corner. Those girls were too far gone, too enslaved by some doped-up pimp to pretend for more than an hour that they're something they're not. He needed someone who could fake loving him, who could fake cry over his dying soul.
     Amazing the things one could find on the internet these days.
     He got a phone number off of some very classily inappropriate website, and called at precisely four in the afternoon.
     "This is Kat," the voice said over the phone, just above a whisper. Greg felt tingles on the back of his spine, maybe out of nervousness or maybe out of passion, but he shook it off and answered her.
     "Hey, I'm Greg. This is really weird to do over the phone, so could we meet in person to talk?"
     The woman paused for a moment before replying in a more natural voice, "You would have to pay me for talking, too. If it's in person."
     It was Greg's turn to pause. He rubbed his head and looked in the mirror. Bald.
     He had had such nice hair once.
     "Sure, sure," he answered after a moment. "That's fine."

~

     Kat wasn't what he expected. She definitely didn't look street corner material, with her soft brown hair and dark green eyes. She looked refined, elegant even, and he wondered why exactly she was stuck in this particular position. After he opened his front door to her, she surveyed his house as if she was about to buy it, noticing every object and every flaw. When she sat at his kitchen table, he took a moment to consider if this was wrong. But then she looked at him with condescending eyes, a look she must have perfected from mirroring those looking at her, and asked him why he had insisted on explaining himself to a prostitute in person.

     "You're not going to believe me, and I wanted to make sure you wouldn't just hang up," he sighed, trying to look back at her without judgement in his own eyes; the level he was on was far below what she stooped to for a job.

     Kat stood up abruptly. "If you're thinking of attacking me, it won't end well for you. We both have all our clothes on, you can't prove I'm anything other than a friend, and I always have 911 one button press away when I enter the house for the first time."

     Greg's eyes widened, and he backed up a step before addressing her concerns. "No, I meant, you would think I'm not serious and just hang up. Not, I'm trying to lure you here to kill you. Definitely not that last one."

     She sat back down, her legs crossed and her mind back at ease. "So, tell me what you want."

     "You're high-end, right?" Kat nodded. "That means you can pretend to be something like a girlfriend, right?"

     Kat kept the condescending look in her eye. "I can be whatever you want for the right price."

     "Fair enough. I have stage four brain cancer. The doctors still have me on chemotherapy, but they're about to give up. Once they do, I have about two weeks to live."

     "And you want one last good time before they send you to your death?" she asked, some of the judgement gone from her eyes. "I can respect that."

     Greg shook his head. "I don't want to have sex with you, Kat. I'm going to give you all the money I have left to go with me to the hospital. To watch me die."

     There was silence in the room for a while. Kat shifted in the wooden seat and pulled her dress down while Greg kept checking the time over her shoulder.

     "Okay," she said finally.

     "The website said you usually ask for the money in advance for these types of things." When Greg started to pull out money, she stood up and stopped him.

     "You can pay me when you're dead," she told him, no fear or discomfort apparent on her face. The elegance he had seen when she came in was gone, and he knew in that moment that he may have been the one dying, but she had seen and done things that would make anyone want to jump off a cliff. "Here's my private cell phone number. Call me when you want me. I just need to know the when and where."

     She left him with a card, but no kiss goodbye, even though he was secretly hoping for both.

~

     Kat got the call at three in the morning; since it was her personal cell phone, and she had been lying next to a very old, very rich politician, she forgot to speak in her sultry voice, instead using a groggy "What?" 

     It was the paramedics, and they were calling her because Gregory Landen was being admitted to the hospital, and he wanted them to call his friend to meet him there. She hopped out of bed, and put her clothes on from the day before; a black dress strikingly appropriate and inappropriate for what was about to happen. In her car on the twenty minute drive over, she pondered if a dying man would care that her makeup was smudged from another man, that her clothes were dirty with someone else's sweat.

     When Kat got there, it was obvious that Greg did not have much time, so she pulled the chair in the room closer to his bed, and placed her hand gently over his.

     "Hey, friend," he chuckled, but it was nervous, it was weak, it was the sound of a balloon slowly losing its air.

     "Hey, friend," she whispered back without knowing why her voice was soft as well. "Is there anyone else you want me to call?"

     "Parents are dead. Friends drove me nuts when I first got diagnosed, so when I moved I didn't really reach out." She struggled to understand what he was saying. "I don't even have a boss to notify. But don't worry, I have the money for you. In my wallet. Everything I got left after the operation, and the chemo, and this final stay."

     She waved her other hand. "I'll get paid when you're dead, remember? Don't worry about that stuff."

     Greg smiled. Again, the elegance of when she walked into the room was dashed by when she opened her mouth. That was the voice of his angel.

     His paid angel.

     He slept only for a few moments before being woken up by his own inability to breathe. The nurses came in and threw an oxygen mask over his face; they didn't look in the direction of the girl in the wrinkled dress, with the smudged makeup and tired eyes.

     Kat didn't look their direction, either. She was staring at her hand resting on top of Greg's. He was minutes away from death, and both of them knew it.

     "You'll stay for a little bit, right?" he managed to say to her.

     "Got nowhere else to be."

     "I like that. You should stay, just for a little bit."

     Kat felt her eyes tearing up, and knew some part of her was close to death, too. The part of her that took money from sleeping men, that spoke in low voices with strangers, that wore short dresses and had to keep emergency personnel on speed-dial.

     "Don't worry about that stuff," she repeated, and he nodded his head.

     The heart rate on the monitor flatlined, but no one came running in like she expected them to. She didn't even get up out of her chair, didn't even startle at the sound. A nurse came in maybe a minute later and turned the equipment off. Kat moved her hand so the bed sheet could go over his body.

     She looked at the clock and it was almost four in the morning. The sun would be peeking out in an hour, and she would have another day of calls and kisses and too much more.

     The part of her that took money from sleeping men resurfaced, and the nurses were puzzled when they saw a girl in a wrinkled black dress emerge from the room counting bills.

writing adventure 19- Anger

Anger is an open door

That slams fast and hard,

But after awhile no one will remember.

Anger is an open sea,

Sometimes calm on the surface,

Sometimes rough and violent.

Anger is an exclamation point,

Used in different ways,

But always the same deep down.

Anger is a calm before the storm,

Scarier than the actual thing,

Making you panic and cry out.

Anger is the feeling that there is nothing to lose,

And nothing to gain.

Anger is an unloaded gun,

Useless until you put some thought into it.

writing adventure 18- Orphans (Jack's Mannequin)

     As much as I pretended to know who you were, I never predicted this would be the end. I thought we had planned this out together. I was supposed to be right behind you the whole time.
     Everyone always said prison would be a lonely existence, but I never really felt it until I woke up this morning and the guards were right outside the bars, yelling at me to get up, yelling at me that you had tried to escape.
     Without me.
     What I'm still trying to figure out is how you got so far before they shot you through the head from 100 yards.
     Anyway, I'm writing this on the tough toilet paper in solitary confinement; one of the nurses took pity on me when I went to go see your body and gave me a pencil so I could do this. She's nice, you'd be so excited to be staring up at her all day, if you could still get excited. Maybe you can, I don't know. Maybe, when we planned out this escape, when we talked about it for hours in our cell, when we perfected how to whisper in code just so we would never get caught, this is what you were really planning. Maybe, what happened to you was the real escape. A bullet was your only way out.
     It doesn't matter now. In this moment, I'm in solitary, and I'll stay in solitary for a lot of moments before they forget this whole ordeal and let me out.
     I'll never forget this whole ordeal. I was going to have a life with you, a real one. And I know that you said we couldn't be in love out there, and I pretended to understand, but you never said anything about in here.
     It's your turn to pretend to understand. I'm going to flush this now, and hope it gets to you. And if it does, I want you to pretend to understand that I did love you in this fake life, and that it's wrong and disgusting and the only thing I had.

writing adventure 17- Dear Maria, Count Me In (All Time Low)

     His life was a cliche. If high school wasn't one big cliche, he would probably have shot himself by now.

     Okay, that was too morbid, even for the nerdy kid with the crush on the only girl worth mentioning at his school.

     Yeah, that girl. That girl that tortures you just by staring in your general direction, that makes you grin just by saying hello. That girl.

     She walked the halls like a queen, and everyone fell at her feet accordingly. She never asked for it, not out loud anyway, but that smile was impossible not to worship, and those eyes held such secrets. It had surprised him when he realized she wasn't evil, like some other honorable mentions residing in the halls. 

     Maria. Damn, how could he have turned into that guy? The one who never gets the girl, the one that spends his nights staring up at the dark ceiling imagining exactly what he would say to sweep that girl off her feet. Damn.

     It wasn't as if he went totally unnoticed by her. They had math class together, and she told him he was funny (funny guys are best friends is what he thought right after) and had even invited him to a party (because she was the nicest girl on campus, and this was probably a publicity stunt). Of course, he had refused, because no self-respecting guy takes a pity offer from the girl of their dreams.

     Damn.

     Shoveling books into his locker, he realizes math class is just around the corner. Maria was always in before him, sitting at her desk as her friends flocked to her side. They always went to her; she was that girl after all. Usually one of them would be sitting on the corner of his desk, and he would have to wait for the bell to ring to actually sit down. No way was he going to mess up by telling one of her friends to shove off. No way he was getting branded a jerk. All he had going for him was that he was a nice guy!

     Damn.

     He heard her mention the party from a few days ago as he walked into class. Today was Friday, meaning she would be having fun tonight and he would be staring holes into the ceiling. Only, what if he wasn't?

     The thought left him standing in the doorway, eyes wide and unblinking. Unbeknownst to him, Maria had caught his form walking in, and now watched uneasily from her seat. Making a very thought out decision, she shooed her friends from their perches around her and made her way towards the frozen boy.

     "Hey," she said as nonchalantly as she could muster, her right hand resting on her hip.

     He immediately snapped out of his daze. "Maria," he said, still shocked she would ever speak to that guy. The rest of the room was just as shocked it seems, for they all turned in his direction. He suppressed  a blush as best he could.

     "Just so you know," she whispered, drawing him in. Finally, that girl had gotten her cool back, "I'm going to this party with or without you, but it'd be nice to see you there. The invitation is still open."

     Then, Maria smiled at him.

     Damn.

     "Count me in," he said, and smiled back.

     

writing adventure notice 1

(there probably won't be more of these, but I numbered it just in case.)

Because of my now hectic schedule and sore leg muscles, I'm going to try my hand at writing some stuff that's inspired by listening to one song over and over and over again while writing. I've done it before accidentally, so I figured why not try to do it purposefully and see if anything good comes of it. Don't worry, I'm not going to just write lyrics word for word, or put down any at all, but the title of the entry will be the song title and artist. I think it will be easier to grab inspiration this way than my tested method of staring at a computer screen for fifteen minutes.

I'll start this small project later tonight, at my usual awful hour.

writing adventure 16- Enough

     She woke up in the hospital, groggy and in pain. Her first thought was 'Shouldn't I be at a photo-shoot?'
     Her second thought was 'When did that become so important?'
     The doctor gave her a look she knew well: one of judgement, one of shame, one that lingered long after everyone turned away and said goodbye. She blinked a couple times after she realized her eyelids had drifted closed again, and waited for him to speak. "Hello, Jade. How are you feeling?"
     "Um. . ." she said, and her voice was barely a whisper. 'How long have I been asleep?' she worried to herself. "I'm okay, I think. My head hurts."
     The doctor smiled at her, and she smiled brightly back. Then, the doctor frowned at her, and she became worried again. "Listen closely to what I have to say, Jade. You've been here at the hospital for two days. Your roommate found you passed out in your bathroom. You were severely malnourished, and were suffering from alcohol poisoning. Do you understand what I'm telling you? This lifestyle," he sighed as he saw her eyes begin to water, "this lifestyle is going to kill you. The only thing I can do is release you. I hope you consider actually taking care of yourself." With that, the doctor signed her chart, and left it on the table in her room.
     She cried for about twenty minutes before she left for home.

~

     Samantha, her roommate, had also been in tears when Jade arrived at her apartment. There had been screaming and hugging and even more crying, and, finally, a decision.
     They sat down on Jade's bed together, their tears dying down. "Are you sure about this?" Samantha asked, and Jade nodded her head slowly. 'No,' she added silently in her head, 'I'm not sure.'
     "It's the only thing I can do, you know? Sometimes, I guess, dreams shouldn't really come true," Jade said, and the tears came again.
     Samantha inched closer and hugged the other girl. "It'll be okay. You're smarter than the rest of our friends put together. You can always have another dream."
     Jade smiled through her tears. "Yeah," she said. "I have to make a call."

~

     The agency had hung up with her as soon as she had quit. By doing so, she had voided her contract with them, and that was that. There was no loyalty in modeling; once you had made your rounds, you were done, and that was that. They had probably been trying to get rid of her for weeks. 

     They probably looked at this like she was doing them a favor, almost killing herself accidentally by chugging vodka as a meal. Trying to lose weight she didn't even have.

     Afterwards, she was restless. Clueless. Nowhere to go, and nothing to believe in. So, she walked. Right out of her Hollywood apartment, right down streets she had never walked before.

     Until she stopped. There was a tattoo parlor to her left, called True Tattoo. Not stopping to think, she walked in, and sat down in the chair closest to the door. 

     Before long, a man motioned for her to join him at the counter. "Hi," he said, his voice shockingly light compared to the tattoos that riddled his body, "my name is Trevor. Do you know what you want?"

     "Yeah, I do. I want the word 'Enough' written, in all caps, going up the right side of my body. Can you do that?" Jade tapped her fingers on the glass counter, fidgeting nervously and wondering if she should run.

     He nodded, still smiling at her. "Sure, we can do that. Actually, I can do that," he laughed. "If you're that sure, we can do it right now. And I'm the artist in today, so come right around and we'll lay you on the bench in the back of the store." He opened the small swing doors that separated the front from the back of the store, and she walked all the way to the back.

     For the first time since she moved to the city, she doesn't walk as if she's on a runway. She walks as if she's Jade Nevarra, someone normal and sane and something more than a dumb blonde model.

~

     Halfway through the long process of acquiring the tattoo, Jade stopped cringing. Trevor took this as a good sign; he knew what a first tattoo felt like, and he knew it didn't feel like a good decision.

     "So," he said, trying to talk to the girl that stumbled into the shop, "why did you choose to get this?"

     "The first time I walked into a model agency building, they said I was perfect. Perfect hair, perfect weight, perfect height. Perfect. Then, it changed. They told me that the right side of my body was perfect. Perfect skin, perfect bone structure, perfect look. Then, it changed again. They told me I had gained too much weight, that my hips were too big, that I wouldn't get any covers of any magazines with just one good side and cheeseburger thighs. So, I stopped eating. For a while, I lived on coffee in the morning, and alcohol at night. It kept me alive until two days ago, when my friend found me unconscious in my bathroom. Now, I'm kind of sick of not being good enough. I'm saying 'enough.' Does that sound crazy?" 

     Trevor stopped working. "It's not crazy on your part. It's crazy on theirs. Seriously, I'm down to bomb the place if you are. You definitely have more than one good side. I mean, not that I've noticed," he corrected, waving his arms in front of his face.

     Jade looked at him. Really looked at him. The small tattoo on his neck was a date, the one peeking out from under his sleeve looked to be the bottom of a cross. His left hand had letters on his pinkie through his pointer finger, that spelled out "FATE." 'You're imperfect to them,' she said in her mind, as she stared into his eyes, 'but there's no discovery in perfection, is there?'