TI♥T: A Story

One of my very favouritest discoveries of recent times is the amazing Erika Napoletano, a.k.a Redhead Writing. I found Erika on Twitter thanks to one of those random retweet/comment/replay melanges that can only happen on Twitter, and have followed her writing hither and yon since then. In a word, I think Erika is BRILLIANT. She is straight shooting, snarky, hilarious, at times poignant, always a pro and says so many of the things that some of us blush to think.

Today on her blog Erika posted a photo prompt and a challenge to write a story, with a promise that she will also tell her own story etc ... you can find out more & see the image that launched a thousand (well, we'll see) stories here: http://www.redheadwriting.com/more-than-words.

And so, for Thing I Love Thursday, I give you a short short story. Inspired by the photo, and by the promise of Erika telling all, or at least a little something. And I'll just say this before I begin - there is something that happens in me when I sit to write a story - to express my reality in imaginary ways - that is absolutely exquisite and delicate and unstoppable. It's a feeling unlike any other that simultaneously fulfills and purges me. Much of my blogging is the other kind of writing - self-obsessed, personal, suited better for personal catharsis than public consumption. This other writing is what I mean when I tell you I'm a writer.

I'm a writer. And I wrote this:

I had sent him all my words, an advance party to prepare the way. Email warning shots. And text message tattoos. I had sent word bomb after word bomb, and driven through the night. I had stopped at the side of the road, rested my weary eyes and eased my weary body as best I could. I had telecommunicated all he should be prepared to see, and to witness, and to communicate in return. And I had ignored the known fact that his receptors had never really been keenly tuned, even when he had pretended to want to hear.


I had ignored the warnings of the frosted trees, the sliding roads, the silent hills. My brown eyes were such flawed scopes of this reality, were so incapable of measuring the distance in any real terms. The shushing tires were accurate, the yearning was not. I had forgotten the un-crossable miles between my soft lips and his bunkered ears - the no-go-zones so extensive, the mine fields so copiously seeded.

And now here I sat. Nail scrapes clearing my vision only slightly. Raising just enough fog to see what he had never had the ability or the willingness or the courage to say. Scales in front of my eyes falling away to reveal only a man-shaped hole where love and hope used to be. He didn’t move. And neither did I. We just sat, and stared until the openings I had create frosted over, and he was finally gone.