This is one of my characters that I have been writing...

My new story is first person, but interspersed within the story are letters and journal entries from her boyfriend's journal. This is one of them. I know you can hear my voice in this.


“I WILL REMEMBER YOUR SMALL ROOM, THE FEEL OF YOU, THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW, YOUR RECORDS, YOUR BOOKS, OUR MORNING COFFEE, OUR NOONS OUR NIGHTS, OUR BODIES SPILLED TOGETHER, SLEEPING, THE TINY FLOWING CURRENTS, IMMEDIATE AND FOREVER, YOUR LEG MY LEG, YOUR ARM MY ARM, YOUR SMILE AND THE WARMTH OF YOU WHO MADE ME LAUGH AGAIN.”

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

When I was a child, beauty and magic was everywhere. I found it in the big yard, in forests and rocks and waters. Sometime after I had become what is considered an adult, I lost the beauty and magic. At first I didn’t realize it was gone, just that everything about life irritated or prickled or drew blood. This was a slow time where the beauty and magic would occasionally flirt with me while I was under the influence of one thing or another, but it would escape, slipping from my fingers. I would be left with the still gripping hand, saying “What was that? For a second, I remembered something…”

Eventually, the darkness became so intense that I could never see those snatches of beauty and magic. I sought the catharsis of other things, various distractions that reminded my unconscious mind of the hidden, the forgotten, the treasure of my life. Time
passed, and as it did, it became apparent to me that the world and its outside forces were not the root of my problem, it came from within. The memory of the beauty and magic returned with full force, and instead of being a comfort, it became a tormentor.
It taunted me with its smells in a warm spring day or the solemn silence of watching snow fall on a holy winter night. It hung and wavered like crepe paper streamers left after a party; just shreds of the happy times gone past.

I rack my memory. How did I see the beauty and magic when I was a child? How did it leave me? Or worse still, is it so buried and hidden and remote that it is impossible to retrieve? I live in a shell of what I was, an empty room that echoes and stills and remembers what used to be but is no more.

So I follow the song’s advice and party ‘til I pass out, drink ‘til your dead but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m waiting; either for the death or the complete madness that brings the beauty and magic back to me.