Things to do at two a.m.
- Use too much milk and too much sugar in your coffee. Ignore the stomach ache and try to emulate instead. Pale and sweet and alert and oh-so-quiet.
- Read the poems of a girl whose brain you envy enough to consider Frankenstein a secret genius. Read them again, for the fifteenth time, and imagine cutting her skull open for your own sick enjoyment. Or benefit.
- Get lost in an article about a woman with sapphires embedded in her eyes, or a guy who eats nothing but tiger lillies and candle wax.
- Listen hard to every little groan your old house makes, and groan back. You both have stories, and you're gonna have to get friendly at some point. One of you does own the other, after all.
- Sit with that sickening urge to write, the one that builds like a forest fire and burns off your fingertips, the one that you still don't know if you really like or not, the one that will probably kill you someday, and try to find yourself amidst the clanging chaos that is constantly crowding out your brain. Mentally apologize to every person you've ever loved for only being able to offer them this weird half-human relation and hope that they hear you in their dreams.
- Experience five seconds of crippling anxiety over everything possible, all in a row. Your bills and your dirty fish tanks and the pipes that will definitely burst unless you keep a fire going all night long. Your ever-better marriage and your fading desire for children. Your dead end job and your shooting star dreams, which might only ever be stars and never craters in the ground to show you where they landed. The weird sound in the back of your head when everything is quiet, and all the dirt in the air and the water and the spaces in between your eyelashes. War and peace and the streak of bone-deep violence in you that you just never understood and probably never will. Two hours of panic and you're only halfway through the possibilities.
- Fantasize about life as an elephant. It must be empowering to be so large, the pure usage of space.
- Watch two episodes of some teen romance sitcom and dream up a new story instead of paying attention.
- Image search mountains and rivers and girls who have haircuts like boys. Research the watercolor paintings of schizophrenics and cry because it hurts so beautifully and hits so close to home. Scribble down the names of book agents, medicinal plants, the effects of electrostatic shock when applied to the human heart. Write a confession, a justification, an announcement, and tear out four pages destined for the trash before you give up.
- go back to bed
(This is the version of that aforementioned confession/justification/announcement that survived the trash:)
*clears throat*
I won't be continuing Double Struck.
In a way, I am very sorry, but in another way I'm not sorry at all.
I'm sorry that my last offering to this fandom actually happened long before I was even aware of it and I didn't have time to savor that moment. But I guess going out on Bite Club is just about the best I could ever do around here. I'm ok with that.
I'm sorry that my taste for twific got so jaded that I just couldn't find the joy in the writing of this particular tale anymore which, frankly, had been nothing but a joy from the start. It hurt just to think about it, which made the writing of it impossible, and when you're one of those write-or-die types you might as well be a junkie withdrawing. That kind of ache goes bone deep.
I'm sorry that I gave little mouthfuls of false progress, but even I was hoping that the candy coating would be sweet enough to mask the bitter taste.
But . . .
I'm not sorry that I followed some advice from a writer I really admire and did a find/replace to change their names. It started as an innocent attempt to break through the writer's block, but grew into something else entirely. Lit a little spark in my brain.I'm not sorry that I've been lying in bed dreaming about this story, which, let's face it, was always more original fiction than it ever was twific. Fantasizing about all the millions of possibilities if I just took the box off and let the poor thing stretch its muscles.
I'm not sorry that I'm putting a gold collar around Hadley Hemingway's neck and taking her with me. I have a collar made of diamonds and, together, that girl and I are gonna attempt to work some magic.
I have my epic monster/lovechild/manuscript, this story, a kid's book, three other documents just begging for a facelift, and my head is full of stories I haven't even dreamed up yet. It's exhausting. I can barely keep up and I've been sleeping less and less lately. Which works for me, because three a.m. seems to be my witching hour. I don't know when you'll hear from me next. I don't know what it will be, which foot will end up in which door, which story will hit the ground first. I don't know what name I might use. I only know that a couple of years ago I started climbing up this giant ladder to a towering diving board and then I stood there at the end of it for just a little too long, toes gripping the edge. It's been a long, hard, terrifying talk with myself, prepping to take the leap, but I've been too scared to let go because fear has a funny way of rendering you unmovable.
