In my attempt to become a successful author who will make people feel things... I have acquired a lot of scattered writings. In my Gmail account under 'drafts', in various journals and notebooks...None of them connect and none of them are complete. Most are abandoned projects I'm too embarrassed to continue and some are shadows from a past life I don't even remember.
Not including the personal or embarrassing or down-right confusing pieces of writing that may or may not be life-changing to a teen someday, I have taken some scraps from the debris that I would like to share with you, the internet. Also, none of these are related so...just take them for what they are:
Diet coke. The bubbles float up through the ice like plinko chips.
“Let me teach you a thing or two about life…”
“But, I like not knowing about life. That way it’s exciting when it hits me”
Leaving his dark body outlined by the moon against white sheets.
The sun would slide down her dark curls that hung loosely over her shoulders. The smoke from her cigarette would twist and dance with her hair before it was sucked out the window and I would lean against my door in the passenger seat. She always looked so glamorous with big sunglasses on her nose and a cigarette poised carefully between her two fingers. I tried holding a cigarette once for Margot as she rummaged through her purse to get something. I felt clumsy, and for the first time in my life I questioned the dainty quality of my hands as I worried about the pressure I should use to hold it. It felt so fragile and unbalanced billowing up a fear of dropping it with the rising smoke. But Margot held it with grace as if it were an accessory.
We bought digital tape recorders on a three am whim to carry around with us for the book called “24/7 with Margot and Penny”. It was a book in which we were to transcribe a full 24 hours of our jibber jabber. It was a good idea in the isle of WalMart where they sold electronics we would never learn to operate. It was a good idea on top of a mountain as words fell out of our mouths over the speed limit. However, once in the parking lot with directions unfolded in my lap, it was useless.
Those hand-held recorders filled with two hours worth of memories sat in the bottom of sticky glove boxes and floated stagnant in the middle of junk drawers. The book was never written and we just kept driving.
She used to tell us, “The world is my bulletin board,” right before she hung another picture above our couch. The pictures of Jesus were taken from LDS libraries on cardstock and thumb-tacked into the middle of a wall with the bright orange tack stealing all of the attention. It was comfortable though, and I liked my mother’s sense of anti-style.
“I just don’t understand how God can call imperfect men to be bishops or leaders of any kind…how that can happen?” she would ask, the words written in the smoke.
I never struggled with those questions so I had no answer; I would just lean my head further out the window. I always knew no one was perfect, so how could God call a perfect man? There are no perfect men; it was an impossible task, even for God, and I knew it. It’s like when people ask, “How can bad things happen to good people?” and I just shrug my tight shoulders and think, how can you think any part of life is bad? It’s life. You’re living and breathing; and with all the possible complications at birth, you’re a miracle; be grateful for your tiny tax refund and your asbestos-covered ceilings.
The Eagles were telling me to take it easy so I let my eyes close and felt the energy of the sun soak into my eye lids...
The house we saw in front of us across the street was plain; not to be noticed unless you wanted to notice it. There was wood paneling along the front, painted a long time ago with long strokes of dull blue. The house had three steps leading up to a porch which held the front door and three tall windows showing off the living room. It would have looked like any other house in a number of pictures drawn by your four-year old niece, except for the oversized window to the right of the front door. The window stood as a picture frame, holding any given moment in the kitchen frozen, hanging on the dull blue wood as it would on a wall in a museum.
"Nice to meet you," his response was Pavlovian as was my lack of caring enough to stop and wonder if it really was nice to meet me.We sat like women with our legs angled and our knees together, but whispered like preteens about the boy with the heavy gold chain around his neck.
Above his lips was a dark mole on the right side. A punctuation mark stating his existence.
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