Fear

Cracked

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It started with a small crack. He had underestimated just how much small cracks mattered, but it made sense. A small crack was all it too to eventually break down any rock. One sentence, said once, and it changed everything.

It was always there, in the back of his mind. Other moments that would have meant nothing now had a way to worm their way into his mind. Fears that previously would have had nothing to latch onto now found a foothold. As time wore on and the crack grew bigger, he started to feel like he was looking at life through it. Everything came back to the crack.

If he’d done something about it when it was small, he might have been able to avoid the eventual breakdown. A small discussion or some work to try to patch things up. Anything would have been better than letting it go.

Eventually, it was ruining his life. The fear and doubt had wormed their way in so that there was almost nothing left to him but the rubble of his once unified sense of self. So he ended it. He broke it off.

It did not go well. She didn’t see what the problem was and she wasn’t willing to talk about how bad things had gotten. He wasn’t willing to try to make her see it. Eventually, after many tears on both their parts, they split up.

In the weeks that followed, as he swept away the rubble and tried to figure out what to do with what was left. Once he started picking up the pieces, it became clear he would never be the same. Eventually, he knew he’d be okay. Different, but okay.

 

My Voice

Chris 1 Comment

My voice can fade from lack of use.

My neck is caught up in a noose
Built according to my own design.
There never was a loop so malign
As the fears so doggedly adverse
And twisted into this evil curse.

The end of the cord lies in shaking hands
That seem to have their own firm plans
Of when to tug and when to let be
Because this rope is not to kill me.

I wove this rope of silence and fear
Of the loss of all that I hold dear,
Despite insisting all of the while
That my thoughts and truths were not on trial.
Lies told by my insecurity
To preserve my sense of maturity.

This lesson I learned as I have grown:
My silence belongs to me alone.

Moments of Quiet

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It is these moments of quiet,
As my brain creeps toward sleep,
That keep me up at night.

The time before is calm and soft:
Full of lingering traces of all
I have accomplished that day
And everything I desire to do
When I wake on a brand new day.

The time after is strange and quick:
Full of half dreams lost to me
As soon as their story has ended
And small movements that feel fast
As my body begins to slumber.

During, though, there is only silence.
I am left with the darkness of my room
Mirroring a darkness inside of me
I can only manage to drive away
With things that would keep me from sleeping.

During these moments of quiet,
I am the captive audience of my fears
And every single thing that went wrong
During any day I can remember
Plus a few more I had once forgotten.

It is no wonder I do not sleep well
When I cannot bypass these moments
Without crashing from awake to asleep.

My Dream Car

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Lee stood at the window, folding laundry as he waited for his girlfriend. As he moved deeper into a pile of shirts, he saw a car pull up. A moment of excitement, the car pulled away and he remembered Amy was still too far away.

He took a pile of shirts and put them away. When Lee turned around, he noticed a car pull up to the curb, pause for a moment, and then drive away. Curious, he absently picked up another shirts and kept folding. On the fifth, the car pulled up to the curb, hesitated for a moment, and then drove off again.

Gone were thoughts of shirts and his girlfriend. Lee tossed his laundry aside and moved to the downstairs window. A couple minutes later, the car pulled up to the curb, hesitated, and then drove away.

While he contemplated this pattern, it came by again. The interval between the car’s disappeared and reappearance began to shrink until it came into sight as soon as it vanished. After a minute, he noticed the car creeping closer to his window. He jumped back from the window. He couldn’t see the car past the blinds in any of the windows, but he could hear it zipping around.

Just as it sounded like it was about to tear his house apart, he found himself sitting on his bed next to a pile of laundry, phone buzzing in his pocket. Still listening for the rush of air that was the car, he saw his girlfriend’s picture.

“Hello?”

“I’m outside.”

“Sorry.” Lee hurried toward the door. “I dozed off.”

“Really?” Lee unlocked the door and hung up his phone. Amy’s worried face greeted his.“It looks like a bunch of cars drove over your lawn. How could you have slept through that?”

Horror Movie

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He knew his apartment did not have a good setup for horror movies, but he couldn’t resist them. His couch only fit in the living room with its back to the rest of the apartment and the room was too narrow for other chairs. Even the constant creaking of floors and the furtive sounds of movement whispering through his walls couldn’t convince him of his folly. Attendance at his viewing parties had dwindled after he moved here and now he watched horror movies alone.

He was used to surround sound from his old apartment, so he didn’t notice that not all of the sounds were coming from his home theater until the first thing fell off his counter. After fixing the mug’s handle the following morning, he kept a closer eye on his kitchen and a closer ear on the sounds of his apartment. He took careful note of every sound made by the neighbors and wrote down every creak of walls as the building shifted in the wind.

The following movie night, he was ready. It was a zombie flick he’d seen before, but he picked it because it had always sounded fake to him. As the movie went on, he noted every noise that came from behind him, glancing over his shoulder for the source. He saw a pan hanging beneath his cabinets shift in the still apartment air and noted that as well.

For three weeks, he took notes. At the start of the fourth movie, he shifted so he was sitting on the floor in front of the couch. He had his notebook ready, but he heard nothing from behind him. Once the movie was over, as he headed off toward his bathroom and bed, he heard something new.

Thanks for moving.

Tabletop Highlight: Tak

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I love strategy games. I was in the Chess Club during high school and enjoyed learning to play Go in college. I ran out of people willing to play with me before I ran out of willingness to play either of these timeless classics. I’ve always been on the lookout for new games like those, but most of them wind up being fun but lacking in complexity. I’d wind up with one or two winning strategies I could pretty much rely on and I would soon start to miss the variety of play that Go and Chess afforded.

One the other loves of my life is books by Patrick Rothfuss (Primarily the Kingkiller Chronicles, since I feel his “children’s” books lack the narrative complexity I prefer). In one of his books, Wise Man’s Fear, the protagonist (Kvothe) is introduced to a popular strategy game and taught at least a little bit of the larger strategy of it by repeatedly getting his ass handed to him. His tutor, a noble who has been kind enough to also teach him some of the rules of the particular high society Kvothe has found himself in, wants to play a “beautiful game” rather than simply win and highlights the differences for Kvothe. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t actually go into enough detail to learn to play the game. Fortunately, Patrick Rothfuss teamed up with an excellent game creator so that we could all learn to play it and buy really cool board/piece sets.

Tak, as the game is called, is conceptually simple. Build a road of your tiles from one edge of your game board to the opposite. The board can be any size beyond 4×4, and the number of pieces available to each player changes accordingly. The larger the board you’re using, the more complex the game you can play. In addition to the horizon “road” tiles, you can place them vertically for “standing stone” pillars that prevent the other player from moving or building their road through that square. On your turn, you can choose to move any tile or pillar you’ve placed to an adjacent square, placing it on top of anything but standing stone pillars. Once you’ve made a stack, whoever controls the piece on the top of the stack controls the stack. Once you get beyond 4×4 boards, you get a piece called a “capstone” that is like a super pillar capable of flattening standing stones into road tiles.

The strategy required to build your road grows in complexity and potential cleverness as the size of the board increase. While I can see how some brutal math and efficient use of tiles and pillars could easily net anyone a win, I can also see what Patrick Rothfuss’ characters spoke about in his book. I want to play a beautiful game, with clever tricks and a victory that snatches a win from the jaws of defeat. I have already played a few games that saw me win by unforeseen means, completely shocking my opponent as I unfold my route to victory. I’ve also played the brutal, fast matches. If either player starts playing like that and is halfway decent, there’s no way you can win other than to play just as brutally. A beautiful game requires two participants and I’ll admit I’m lacking in a good foe.

Not because I’m better than everyone else–I’ve got about a 60% win rate, so I’m hardly undefeated–but because I’ve yet to find someone who is willing to put in the time and effort to learn the game to the degree one would need to in order to start using some of the more clever strategies. I’ve yet again run into the issue of not having enough willing opponents to enjoy an excellent strategy game.

Which Tak certainly is. I don’t know if it will remain as timeless as Chess and Go are, but I can definitely see myself enjoying this game for years to come. You can play it with pretty much whatever pieces you want and an imaginary board once you know the rules. Or you can buy yourself one of a variety of very nice Tak sets here.

The Affair

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I ran down the hallway, doing my best to get out of the building as quickly as possible. Charlie had told me that if I ever showed my face here again, he’d kick my ass. As self-critical as I often was, I did not think that my ass needed kicking, and so had resolved to stay away. Despite what I had thought were my best efforts, one look at her face and I went running back into her arms. Only this time I came running back and slammed into Charlie, which constituted much more than showing my face.

I could hear Charlie’s cursing echoing down the hallway behind me. I could also hear what sounded disturbingly like the clatter of a metal baseball bat bouncing off the walls. When I reached the end of the hallway, I paused and risked a glance back. Charlie burst around the corner, waving a metal baseball bat around like he trying to make a tornado with it.

I took off running again, taking the stairs right in front of me and vaulting over the railing onto the next set of stairs as I reached the bottom. I kept this up for 10 more flights of stairs, getting a little further ahead each time. On the ground floor, I had almost two whole flights of stairs on him. As quickly as I could in order to preserve my advantage, I darted down one of the three hallways that branched out from the foyer I was in and ran until I turned the corner. Pressing my back against the wall, I looked around for someplace to hide. Twenty feet down, there was a janitorial closest.

Moving as quickly and as quietly as I could, I slipped down the hallway and tested the knob. Locked, Damn! I gave the door a sharp tug in frustration and, to my surprise, it swung open a few feet. I ducked inside the door and pulled it closed behind me, making sure to listen for the click! that told me it was completely closed.

Crouching behind a pile of rags, I took my cell phone out of my pocket and silenced it. The last thing I needed was for my it to go off and give away my position. I can’t believe I’m hiding in the janitor’s closet from Charlie. God, it’s not like I slept with his wife or anything…

Just then, I could hear the heavy tread of Charlie’s booted feet. I held my breath, not trusting the door to hide the noise of my ragged breathing. “Where’d you go, you bastard professor?” I heard. “When I find you I’m going to rip you open and smear you all over the sidewalks!” The footsteps got ever closer. He was moving slowly now, as if he could sense that I was nearby and he didn’t want to spook me into running again.

I started and nearly fell over when the doorknob jiggled. I waited, breath held, hoping that the door stayed closed and my hiding place remained undetected. I’m getting too old for this… was all that ran through my head. The jiggling stopped. The heavy steps moved away and I sighed with relief. This is the last time I sleep with one of my students…

NaNoWriMo Day 23 (11/23)

Chris 1 Comment

Well, today is Thanksgiving in the US. A day to visit family, eat a lot of food, and not get a lot of work done unless you’re one of those unfortunate people who works in the food service or retail who have to spend the morning catering to irate last-minute shoppers or thrifty/greedy bargain-hunting consumers who left the comfort and warmth of their homes and families behind in order to get the deal on some electronics or household items without having to camp outside a store all night. Having done the camping thing before, to get a game console for one of my siblings, I can’t fault people who would choose to go out the day before if it were an option, but I still think its pretty awful to have people who need to work on holidays.

It’s a complicated issue since it involves income inequality, consumerism/capitalism, and a whole bunch of other things that can probably get wrapped under the inequality and consumerism/capitalism. I don’t feel like I should be commenting on this too much since I have a job with holidays, make enough money to live comfortably as a single adult, and participate in some parts of the consumerism and capitalism. I’m a part of the problem, if not the biggest part of the problem, so I don’t want to criticize.

Now that I’ve gotten that little rant out-of-the-way, I can complain about the cold that just won’t leave, won’t let me work, and is putting a serious hold on my travel plans. My head-fuzziness is back, so I don’t really trust myself to safely carry out all my original plans, so I’ve had to make some new ones. I also didn’t get much writing done yesterday, maybe 1000 words, and I don’t think I’m going to get much done today. If all I do today is rest, eat, and go to bed early, I think I’ll count myself accomplished. Tomorrow, though, we will see… This cold seems to take rather drastic leaps in different directions every time I sleep, so I’m hesitant to make projections about how tomorrow will go.

I really would like to keep writing. I’m at the exciting part where I introduce conflicts and start to really establish the main themes of the books. I’ve made little hints and set a lot of the stage of this moment during the past 15,000 words, so I’m excited to start writing it. I have an idea of where its going, but I really want to find out how its going to get there. I really hope I feel well enough tomorrow to just sit down and crank out the next several thousand words. That would be nice. I’d enjoy that.

 

Daily Prompt

Fear can drive us to do some rather ridiculous things. Fears related to physical harm can spur us to take action when we otherwise might not, they can cause us to flee what might be a dangerous situation, and they can drive us to perform better than we thought possible by giving us an extra bit of energy to burn. Fears related to emotion harm are much less clear-cut or cause-and-effect. Fear of rejection and abandonment can cause us to avoid attachments of any kinds. Fear situations that have hurt us before can cause us to avoid anything new or out of the ordinary. Nearly silent fears of our own inadequacy can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. Today, write about a fear your character experiences and what it makes them do, either to escape the fear or confront it.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Today’s inspiration is actually one of the first book series I ever got hooked on: the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. This series about anthropomorphic animals living in a wonderful high-fantasy setting is probably the biggest reason I came to love reading and eventually came to love writing. I didn’t do a whole lot of reading after I learned how to, preferring smaller books that wound up being a few years behind my reading level by the time I was given Mariel of Redwall and Redwall by one of my Aunts as a present. Intrigued by the Mouse with a sword on the cover of Redwall and the commercials I saw on PBS for the animated series, I dug right in and couldn’t get enough to read from then on.

The first author I ever met was Brian Jacques, only a year or two before he passed away. Even now, I can feel the influence the books had on me. Their dedication to making the world feel real and their abundant, wonderful descriptions of food struck a wonderful balance of just enough description to draw you in without losing the pace of the story. I still get sad when I remember that there will be no more Redwall books and I’ll admit that I’ve been unable to read the last book in the series because it’s too emotional. As long as I never read it, there will always be one more book I’ve never read and I’ll be able to put off having read them all.

 

Helpful Tips

As urgent and important as National Novel Writing Month can feel, its important to remember that the rest of your life is important as well. If you don’t manage to finish your writing this month, you haven’t really failed. Sure, you failed a goal you set for yourself, but you tried and trying is often more important for something as long-term as writing. If you can become good at trying, no matter what else happens when you try, I can guarantee you will eventually succeed. The would is full of writers who didn’t start writing right away. People who never even imagined themselves to be writers or that it would even be an option for them. Eventually, they started trying. Eventually, they succeeded. You may not make a million dollars or be the next JK Rowling, but that’s not the point of writing anyway. Write to tell stories. Write because you have something you want to say. Write because you love to use words. Finishing a story is success and whatever happens afterwards is just gravy.