Fall (NaNo practise)

I'm doing all right with this so far, you know. Of course, I'm likely to miss out on most of the first day as I'm going to a party on the 31st, but I intend to at least get my title and symbolic first paragraph written down.

So, yeah. Here's one of the my little practise pieces. Most of them are dreadful, so I'm not even going to bother, but this one is quite nice.


FALL

Take a deep breath. Look at what you are about to become. Fall in. Don't jump. Fall. See the colours swirling around the vision of your closed eyes. And you're scared, of course you're scared, but you allow yourself to fall. Every day.

Hope that one day if you put the wordage in, force yourself to exorcise your brain of all those facts and lives and sentences, maybe something good will come out of it, something good, once you have cleared away all the dead wood. All those words, your whole life reduced to lines on paper, surely something must be good.

And when you look back, read what has gone before, you don't understand a single word - pretty words, put together in a nice and musical way but you have no idea what you were trying to say, what story you were trying to tell. Whose story. It's seperate from you now, stillborn, meaningless. Cold and dead. A child you never heard cry. You can't even see your blood any more, the things you gave when you sat at your desk, your stained bedroom floor, your blood, your sweat, your pain.

And you start again. This time, you will find a story, you will make something that you can care about, and that, in turn, someone else will learn to care about, fall in love with. You play the music that makes you want to cry, the music so beautiful it makes your heart hurt. The music you know you would never make. You make yourself a pot of Rose Pouchong, bring the pot upstairs with you, bring biscuits, a plate of sandwiches, cold milk in a flask, supplies for your long journey, and you sit. On the bed with a typewriter cradled in your lap, leaned against the bed with a notepad propped against your knees, sitting at a desk, sitting on the desk. Every which way. Taken. Raped. That's what it feels like you look at it later, crying, sick, because you know it's no good, and you feel so wasted and used up and tired and broken and torn, three stitches in your brain from the forced entry.

So you spend the whole of the next day reading. It is your last day before you have to go back to work. You sit and read in a fit of rebellion, thinking you can stop time if you stay there long enough, read yourself into someone else's story so you don't have to make up your own poor imitation, because that's all you can do. More tea. You read until your head aches, another forced entry, from the happy, fulfilled, functional writers who sit at their tidy and clean wooden, big desks, cheap from second hand antique shops. They choose second hand so they can kid themselves that other great writers have sat there composing a masterpiece, instead of the table being used for supper for a family of five who have to sell the table when dad loses his job at the factory.

Those functional writers, the bastards who wake at five in the morning and do yoga before writing until eight, when they have to take the kids to school. Those bastards who have a nap in the afternoon and spend the rest of the evening writing, taking their time, loving their wives, drinking strong coffee. And so you throw the book across the room and go for a walk downstairs - you feel trapped, a rat in a cage watching the mice steal all the cheese - to lok out the window. It's so bright and sunny. You can't stand to look at it, so you go back upstairs, stare at your books, all those happy bastards telling you what to do, telling you to write for yourself until you get to the second draft, or to write the worst story ever. You tried that and it really was awful, you ripped it up after the first three sentences and hurled it across the room. There's no time, and you can't think of anything you'd rather do, so you go to sleep, you think about giving up. But there's something inside you, some little part of you like a line of steel, that won't ever break and won't let you stop. Ever.

And you don't want to stop, because of the feeling you get when you fall in and you feel that vortex of silver and gold and black and blue and red seep into your head and all you want is to fall in ever deeper and never return. But of course you have to, because everything ends and sooner or later you have to stop to count your words. But you can start again, you can always start over again, with something different.

Once you've had a taste of what it feels like, to have all those ideas rushing at the front of your head, waiting for their turn to fly to the tips of your fingers, you can't stop. You remember the times it was real, and you were there and living someone else's life, and coming out of it was like going up for air, and the air didn't ever taste quite right and all the colours were dull afterwards. Because that's how it feels to fall.