Last night, as I was fixing a taco dinner, in order to make my husband's Monday not so bad after all, I got this text from my brother Scot.
hey jenny that fragment at the end of your blog, was it a story or real life?
At first, I didn't understand the question, because besides trying to shave some cool, slippery lettuce, I felt this huge rush of fondness for my brother Scotty and texted back to him that I loved that he read my blog.
pshhhhh yeah i do, was his brotherly reply. now answer my question please ^^ It sounded so real i wasn't sure and I was like YOU MET SEPHIROTH IN REAL LIFE!?
There is no word for the delight that ran like fire through my veins at hearing this. It was glee, it was joy, it was darling.
Only my brother Scotty would think such a thing, only my brothers would know, they that played the game with me, that know that I even owned, at one time, a plastic figurine of the character. (That then got thrown out or donated during one of my frequent, religiously driven purges. I lost the tape cassette soundtrack of "The Lion King" in the same way. So sad.)
There is just something so thrilling when someone else sees something in the exact way that you yourself do. Not to mention the fact that it was a great compliment to my writing, that he thought, even for a moment, that it could have been real, that I could have bumped into some eccentric, clever man with ridiculously long silver hair in the Peterborough Library years ago, and told no one until today.
I finished my story last night. The very end of the story took me two days to nail down properly, I kept going off on these little tangents that weren't, in fact, ending up where they needed to go.
But when I finally wrote the last line, it came down like thunder, it reverberated all through me. Oh, my lovely avatars, my simulacrums! How I love them, for dancing to my tune and playing all my parts, the bitter and the sweet.
This won't be the best story I'll write. I feel others in me, they glint in the distances like the snows of Kilimanjaro. I have my eye on their slopes, I am packing the rope, the ice picks.
But no story will mean as much to me as the one I just finished. It was a pathway through to a completely different way of writing and it released all those ghosts trapped for years in side their snow globe, beating against the glass like moths.
I could not sleep last night, I tossed and turned for hours. My imagination flows like a stream of running water all through me. It belongs to me, it sets me apart from others. I am entirely and beautifully myself.
That's what my writing has taught me.
You know what I love about marriage? That moment at night when Keith comes to the bed, where I am already demurely reading, having hogged all the pillows. He comes, he pulls his shirt off and throws it carelessly to the floor, where it will lie until I pick it up the next morning.
The lamplight gleams on the skin of his rounded, heavy shoulder muscles, the side of his throat, his cheekbone. He leans forward and arrogantly throws the covers back, almost all the way to the foot of the bed, revealing the smooth, worn sheet below. And he looks at me then, one swift glance of his eyes and I think with a sudden thrill, that this man has every intention of sleeping in my bed and I had better put my book down and surrender his pillow.
