okay, so i know that a lot of girls do the whole self deprecation thing because they seem to think it is somehow cute or endearing. i fucking hate cunts like that. i am being 100% real and open and honest when i say that it is incredibly difficult for me to share my writing. especially when i dont feel like it completely polished. so that in mind, i am posting page 2 which is a work in progress to say the least. i know the idea i am going with but it is really rough and i need some advice on what to do with it so please dont be too mean i know it needs work but also please be honest. i need some suggestions. especially from any other writers (HERE YOU GO: pg2
It had become a comfortable place. Insignificance. Minutia. And the salty Pacific conspired with me as she hungrily consumed the shoreline.
It's like an inversion of the sensation of your first childhood flight. White-knuckled, knee locked, clenched expectation and the reverberating syncopation of the thundering heartbeat rustling tiny hairs in your ears. The stomach punching implosion as the powerful plane tears itself away from earth like a tree peeling from its shadow at sunset. Suddenly, you were calm, floating tranquil in your omnipotence over miniscule roads, houses, insignificant, faceless people. You knew the blue car would be next to the tree after it crawled around the corner. You saw the tree before the driver did. The driver didnt know that there was a red van six blocks to the left of it or that four of the squat beige houses on that street had turquoise swimming pools that sometimes threw white flashes of sunlight. And sometimes didnt. You knew if the little girl with her sweaty forehead on the window was almost there?. You didnt need to wait for Coastal Access --> you could see the ocean.
This, for me, was another yellowed photograph, slipped from under the plastic film of a photo album that desperately clings to a Time in Childhood before beginnings and ends, before doubt and pain and genocide and war.
Doubt came as a softly taunting chorus and settled as an ever present cacophony that signified maturity. Doubt is the poison that incrementally invaded, slowly, thieving, scheming doubt was the softly traumatizing whore that stretched and climbed and consumed the spaces in my fragile lace of identity. Before doubt, there is only belief. Before doubt, we chant it back, unquestioningly obedient: In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue Before there was anything but belief there were reindeer that flew for one night a year and the teeth slipped under our pillows were traded for shiny coins while we slept.
Doubt, for me, was served up on a platter by my sensible shoed mother who had taught kindergarten for the past 10 years. Her parents had both taught elementary school for fifteen years and were now principals of matching urban impoverished elementary schools. My childhood was an externally expanding shelf of age appropriate books, summer school classes and day trips to the Natural History Museum. My mother was pages torn from a parenting book, experience scrawled notes in the margins. I was five, sitting on the edge of the bathtub because the coiled orange spring of the bathrooms space heater were my only escape from the crisp chill of morning, when she matter of factly changed her soiled maxipad in front of me while explaining simply but never patronizingly, that it would happen to me too, and yes my baby sister Emilia as well. She was part fortune teller, part mysterious holder of pink packaged, redbrown secrets and part science lesson planner. Mostly, I loved it because it had a Dont go talking to your girlfriends at school about it. Lots of parents dont want their kids to know yet. Tacked to the end of it. We never had a kids table and we never thought that Eeky went to heaven. We watched Dad lift her from the street on the flat underside of a shovel and carry her to the ringed sawdusty stump in the backyard. Like a sacrifice on an altar, she lay with her cat claws frozen extended and a redblood secret smeared through the fur on her stomach. Dad dug a hole in the backyard and buried her in a Payless Shoe Source box, so the dog couldnt get to her. The stomach churning, vomit smelling, heart pulling understanding of dead cats was adult business, the grown ups did it but two (then three) pairs of almost matching brown eyes watched it all. Dont babytalk to him. Dad and I dont babytalk to you, my mother would say when I cooed adoringly at my brandnew baby brother. She was teachers bone of teachers blood.
It had become a comfortable place. Insignificance. Minutia. And the salty Pacific conspired with me as she hungrily consumed the shoreline.
It's like an inversion of the sensation of your first childhood flight. White-knuckled, knee locked, clenched expectation and the reverberating syncopation of the thundering heartbeat rustling tiny hairs in your ears. The stomach punching implosion as the powerful plane tears itself away from earth like a tree peeling from its shadow at sunset. Suddenly, you were calm, floating tranquil in your omnipotence over miniscule roads, houses, insignificant, faceless people. You knew the blue car would be next to the tree after it crawled around the corner. You saw the tree before the driver did. The driver didnt know that there was a red van six blocks to the left of it or that four of the squat beige houses on that street had turquoise swimming pools that sometimes threw white flashes of sunlight. And sometimes didnt. You knew if the little girl with her sweaty forehead on the window was almost there?. You didnt need to wait for Coastal Access --> you could see the ocean.
This, for me, was another yellowed photograph, slipped from under the plastic film of a photo album that desperately clings to a Time in Childhood before beginnings and ends, before doubt and pain and genocide and war.
Doubt came as a softly taunting chorus and settled as an ever present cacophony that signified maturity. Doubt is the poison that incrementally invaded, slowly, thieving, scheming doubt was the softly traumatizing whore that stretched and climbed and consumed the spaces in my fragile lace of identity. Before doubt, there is only belief. Before doubt, we chant it back, unquestioningly obedient: In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue Before there was anything but belief there were reindeer that flew for one night a year and the teeth slipped under our pillows were traded for shiny coins while we slept.
Doubt, for me, was served up on a platter by my sensible shoed mother who had taught kindergarten for the past 10 years. Her parents had both taught elementary school for fifteen years and were now principals of matching urban impoverished elementary schools. My childhood was an externally expanding shelf of age appropriate books, summer school classes and day trips to the Natural History Museum. My mother was pages torn from a parenting book, experience scrawled notes in the margins. I was five, sitting on the edge of the bathtub because the coiled orange spring of the bathrooms space heater were my only escape from the crisp chill of morning, when she matter of factly changed her soiled maxipad in front of me while explaining simply but never patronizingly, that it would happen to me too, and yes my baby sister Emilia as well. She was part fortune teller, part mysterious holder of pink packaged, redbrown secrets and part science lesson planner. Mostly, I loved it because it had a Dont go talking to your girlfriends at school about it. Lots of parents dont want their kids to know yet. Tacked to the end of it. We never had a kids table and we never thought that Eeky went to heaven. We watched Dad lift her from the street on the flat underside of a shovel and carry her to the ringed sawdusty stump in the backyard. Like a sacrifice on an altar, she lay with her cat claws frozen extended and a redblood secret smeared through the fur on her stomach. Dad dug a hole in the backyard and buried her in a Payless Shoe Source box, so the dog couldnt get to her. The stomach churning, vomit smelling, heart pulling understanding of dead cats was adult business, the grown ups did it but two (then three) pairs of almost matching brown eyes watched it all. Dont babytalk to him. Dad and I dont babytalk to you, my mother would say when I cooed adoringly at my brandnew baby brother. She was teachers bone of teachers blood.
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To be honest I don't feel qualified to criticize your work. Your talent so far exceeds mine that I am awed.....
I understand by the way about how hard it is to show other people your work. I only rarely do it and probably won't again until what I am writing now is finished. If it ever is...