Twitter Fiction - My First Story (Tweet by Tweet Fiction)

There are lots of iconic first lines in the stories we tell. The kind they make you write about in school. This isn't one of those.

So here's the thing. Storytelling is bullshit.

Of course, I don't really mean that. I'm just not a fall-down-backwards-over-"the power storytelling to change your life" kind of person.

I do like way a good story can bring order to things; the way it organizes. The way is can make some sense out of life. Even if its pretend.

Truth is life is completely senseless. But if you give it a beginning, middle, and an end? Voila. The appearance of - DUMDUMDUMMM - Meaning.

Another "Truth": I could sit here and spin bullshit about "life" and and "meaning" pretty much forever. And you wouldn't know shit about me.

So we best get on with it.

It started when the rains moved in. I literally felt the winds change. And then it darkened.

I didn't quite get it then - how perfect it was. The outside reflecting the inside.  I just figured that today it was supposed to rain.

But put all that aside. The deeper meaning, I mean. And focus on the rain. Because this was one hell of a storm. And I was watching it. My face glued to the front window, all streaked with droplets of water.

The storm moved out as fast as it had moved in. But though the rain stopped, whatever bigger thing this storm had brought with it, it didn’t leave. It hung, damp, over us. And I felt it. Like a chill.

For all that talk of “resilience” and all that openness and sharing and all that therapy and all that “work” I thought I had done, it was here again. And even though I saw and felt it coming, I also knew - remembered, sadly - that there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

Two small birds glided by in formation, as a soft early evening golden white hued light broke. I tracked them across the sky until they shrunk away invisible. 

It was quiet again.

My grandmother used to say, “There’s a quiet *after* the storm too, but folks don’t often talk about that one. Because that’s also when you have the most work to do, especially if you’re soaking wet and freezing cold. The quiet doesn’t last for long.”

I pulled the shades down, one by one, and then sat on the couch in the dark. 

Another thing my grandma used to say was “No matter what it is, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

I always liked that one.

But how can it be that it’s so easy to get lost; that keeping your place is tricky?, I thought. 

Am II nearing the end or only just getting started?

Maybe neither. Let’s be honest. I’m sitting alone in a room at 6:30 mindlessly bouncing between an old episode of Law and Order: SVU, a repeat of SportsCenter from earlier, and the misery of today’s breaking news on CNN.

Slim pickings. But when I’m looking to distract myself from myself, just about anything will do.

Four hours and four episodes of SVU - and a whole lot of disturbing sex crimes - later, I killed the television, pulled a knit afghan over myself and curled up on the couch. I had the kind of dull headache you get from too much TV.  I grabbed a pillow to hug.

Couldn’t sleep though. When I grabbed my phone to check the time, it was 3:20 am. Unsettled, I fell into that compulsive pattern of checking the time in increasingly shorter and shorter increments. Asymptotically approaching 4 am.

It was 4:10 AM. I got up.

I peaked outside. The sun hadn’t yet risen. But I was up for good. I’d been in the house for days feeling sorry for myself.  It was time to break out of that.

I picked up my phone. I was in hiding, but couldn’t seem to stop checking my notifications. Seven missed calls. 27 text messages. 20 WhatsApp messages. 13 Facebook notifications. At least I could see who I was hiding from. But right now I didn’t want to know. I turned it off.

“Clear your head and get out in the fresh air.” “Being in nature is what you should do.” “Get some exercise. Go for a walk. You’d be amazed what it does for your mental health.”

I headed down to the garage and hopped in the car.

The Dunkin’ drive through at the Colonia rest area on the Parkway supplied the caffeine and sugar I needed for the trip. Whatever remained of a large, somewhat watery iced coffee sat in the drink container in the center console.

Oddly, driving alone all hopped up on caffeine can take me to a pretty contemplative place.

It’d been years since the last solo late night drive to the shore. That was not a good time either. Run run run run runaway.

Sometimes you just need to turn the world off and drive fast down the Garden State Parkway with the radio up and the windows down.

A few hours later, I was parked on Ocean Blvd where I could smell the ocean and see the dark waves crashing ashore.

It had been a long time since I checked my phone. I picked it up but then placed it down again. The urge to stay disappeared was stronger than the urge to check it.

The sun was coming up, smudging  orange across the distant horizon over the ocean.

Something moved to my right. I jumped a little. But it was just an early morning jogger. The town was stirring to life. I wasn’t alone anymore.

As daylight came, and the boardwalk began to fill with an assortment of walkers, joggers, cyclists, and beach goers, I realized I was starving. Within minutes, breakfast was all I was thinking about. I stepped out of the car and walked down the block to a diner on the corner.

The stack of pancakes came with a large dollop of already melted butter on top and I applied the syrup. Hot coffee and a fresh squeezed OJ to wash it down. 

“Can you experience pleasure?” “Are you able to feel joy?”

“Why yes,I suppose I can and do.” Exhibit A: This Breakfast.

I sopped as much of the remaining syrup as I could with my final bite and then polished off the coffee. After leaving a $20 bill on the table. I stepped back outside, squinted into the bright sunshine, and turned back towards the beach.

I grabbed a seat on a park bench next to the boardwalk and took off my sneakers. I balled up my socks inside them. Three gulls swooped and dove in the distance. 

“Now take a deep cleansing breath.”

I took a slow deep breath. 

“Concentrate on your breathing.”

I couldn’t.

It was probably time to head out. walked down Ocean to where I’d left the car, opened the driver’s side door and got in. My hand instinctively reached for my phone where I’d left it in the center console. I clicked it ‘on’ and waited as the screen filled with notifications.

My motions were so rapid they appeared almost random. I triaged - calls, emails, messages, texts, social media - swiping, deleting, scanning and gathering in the last 12 hours or so of data from the world I had put away for a bit to take this ride.

After checking, I was now comfortable to continue to put that world to the side for a while longer. I held down the power button and the phone again powered down.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, looking out over the beach, I just smiled when I saw the squall move in so quickly. The sky darkened. Within a minute, the rain splattering against the windshield was absolutely torrential.

You can’t outrun the rain. 

You may gain a temporary reprieve, distract yourself for a while, take in a sunrise at the beach, and even score a pancake breakfast. 

But sooner than later, that storm that’s chasing you - that storm that’s a part of you - comes for you.

The beach and boardwalk were a blur of motion, people rushing to gather their things and running for cover in every which way. The rain beat down in huge cold droplets.

Though I have no memory of exiting the car, I soon found myself among the throng instead of watching it. But I pulled in a different direction from the frantic crowd. I was the only person walking - slowly and calmly - towards beach.

I looked back over my right shoulder. The driver’s side door on my car was open. A faint chime was dinging. The headlights were on. So were the overhead lamps inside the car. The rain - now coming down in steady sheets - was beading on the leather seats.

When I got to the beach, I pulled off my shoes and balled my socks into each shoe. The sand was cold against my bare feet. I trudged on towards the horizon where the ocean and sand met, the waves reaching soaring heights just a few feet away from me.

By this point the rain has soaked through my remaining clothes. The beach was empty. I waded into the ocean -ankle deep, then knee, then thigh. It was so cold that I could barely feel my toes. I looked up, eyes and mouth open to the pelting streaks of rain. Then I dove downward.

I was swimming - or rather, flopping around in a swirl of crashing water and sand and tiny shells, taking on salt water in gulps, trying to figure out what was down and what was up. 

Well. Here I was. “Doing something out  in nature.”

Next thing I remembered was the taste of salt water in my mouth. I was facedown on the beach, a washed ashore bedraggled castaway groggily coming to on the beach. 

But I wasn’t exploring some strange new land. I was right back where I had started.

I sighed as I pushed myself to my feet and started walking back towards the car. 

What was I was even doing with all this? I mean, I think I knew. I was pulling myself outside to push myself to try to feel something.

But with this New Jersey styled walkabout? This Polar Bear plunge / baptism in the rain “adventure”?

It now seemed kind of pointless.

I’d gotten myself out in the world, but I was still absolutely alone. Still inside my own head. 

I toweled off at the car and closed the door.

I sat in the front seat for a long time, staring straight ahead, waiting on myself. 

I didn’t know what was next. The truth was there wasn’t any good reason to go back. But I also didn’t know where going forward meant I was supposed to be going.

It is at this point that it becomes important to provide some context about this time in my life.

I don’t know exactly why that storm triggered such a visceral reaction in me or where I got that urge to drive away and to the ocean. But it wasn’t the first time that storm had visited me, and though this wasn’t something I spoke of to anymore, it was now coming more frequently.

In one version of this story, after I watched the storm appear, I ran and stood outside in its eye, raised my arms and head to the sky, and just let the rains engulf me. Until it stopped.

In another,I drove towards the ocean, but ended up spinning out on the Parkway, careening towards the divider before coming to a full stop. Shaken up and alone on the road, I pulled onto the shoulder and sat there for God knows how long, heart beating out my chest.

About a month ago, a bolt of lightning took down one of the trees in our backyard. It was so dark out that I only heard it snap and then groan. When it hit the house, the window pane I had my nose pressed up against burst into a million pieces. I couldn’t stop shaking.

Last week, I was walking up the front steps to my house when everything went black. I couldn’t have been more than a few steps from the front door, but I couldn’t see it. I felt disoriented. As if I was floating suspended in the middle of the dark sky. I waited for the rain.

I made it inside. Minutes later the lights throughout the house dimmed but held. The rain came so fast and so hard that within minutes the back staircase from our upper yard to the patio became a rushing waterfall. The water rose. And then came pouring into the living room.

Is there a return after the breaking?

I used to think that there was. I mean, obviously. Just as there are downs, there are ups. Ups and downs. People say that. 

But now I’m wholly unsure. Everything feels different. And the storms keep visiting me.

Amanda Gorman is a Revelation: On Storytelling and Hope.

"Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free.  Empires have been raised & razed on much less.  There is nothing so agonizing, or so dangerous, as memory unexpressed, unexplored, unexplained & unexploded.  Grief is the grenade that always goes off."

---Amanda Gorman

"Hope isn't something you’re given, it’s something you practice. It's not an object or a noun that I can buy or demand of somebody to bestow upon me. It is an action. It's a craft. And in the same way that poetry necessitates that I practice it every single day, I think hope is its own art form. It demands that we return to it, that we revisit it, that we live it. And that is something that doesn't “give me hope,” but allows me to give hope to myself again and again."

-- Amanda Gorman

Rebecca Solnit - Humans. Creative.

“What human beings are most of all us creative, from the beginning, so that there is no one way we were or should or could be.”

 - Rebecca Solnit

Baldwin, Morrison and Ray Bradbury On Writing

"When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."
— James Baldwin


'If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.'
— Toni Morrison


“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”
— Toni Morrison


“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury

Susan Sontag: On Writing

"Obviously, I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent… This doesn’t entail moralizing in any direct or crude sense. Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate — and, therefore, improve — our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment...

In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always … an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution — which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our media-disseminated glut of unending stories....

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in."

"

Ernest Hemingway. On Writing.

MICE: How can a writer train himself?

Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you had. That’s a five finger exercise.

MICE: All right.

Y.C.: Then get in somebody else’s head for a change. If I bawl you out try to figure what I’m thinking about as well as how you feel about it. If Carlos curses Juan think what both their sides of it are. Don’t just think who is right. As a man things are as they should or shouldn’t be. As a man you know who is right and who is wrong. You have to make decisions and enforce them. As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.

MICE: All right.

Y.C.: Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When you’re in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think of other people.

The Coming Storm

Sometimes the storm, it's just coming.
No matter what you do.

And you can see it coming.
The skies darkening. 
The storm clouds gathering.
The change in the winds.

And you can feel it coming.
In your knees.
In your gut.
A twitch that won't go away, deep down inside.

It's like depression.
When you can see all the signs.
When you can literally feel it closing around you.
And you still can't do a damned thing about it.

And then, it is upon you.
The darkness crackles and burns.
The skies open up, releasing a pounding cold soaking rain.
The winds roar around and through you.

Then. Quiet?
The clouds fall away.
A ray of sunshine tentatively peaks.
Then another.

You unfurl from your protective crouch.
And stretch out your arms to the sky.

It Happened.

It was my fault. 

I shouldn't have smiled that way.

But if I just don't talk about it, I can make it not be true.

* * * 

It's just. 

I can't stop thinking about it.

The teapot is whistling. My mind wanders. And there he is again.

I feel him. Pressing against me. Testing then advancing. 

I close my eyes. I wish myself away from there.

* * * 

It's just. 

I can't stop thinking about it.

On the subway. I feel someone's hand brush against me and jump sky high.

But it was nothing. Except there I am again. 

In the small room. My room. Bright pink. My dolls hiding scared in the corner.

* * * 

It's a good thing I'm strong now. 

I can store away the bad stuff into porcelain container. Seal it up tight.

I can keep him away from me now.

If I just don't talk about it, I can make it not be true.

It's just. 

I can't stop thinking about it.

Gerunding While Poeming

"Do you mind my asking you?

              I have a writing question.

              It's about the parts of speech."

"In the composing of a poem, what of I-N-G'ing the verb? You know, do you ever noun-ify it?

"Well. The truth is, it's hard to get away with a gerund," he said, with a tinge of wistfulness.

He looked up and paused. Imparting this small teaching made him smile.

Was this the issuing of a challenge? Or a warning?

But my questioning found no mark. I didn't speak it.

I just dutifully recorded his comment, my day's workshopping now complete.

Advice To Young Writers by Andrew Solomon in The New Yorker

"We have equal things to teach each other. Life is most transfixing when you are awake to diversity, not only of ethnicity, ability, gender, belief, and sexuality but also of age and experience. The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls—and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that—the clearer people’s inherent dignity becomes…

Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent. Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones—indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place." 

- Andrew Solomon, Advice For Young Writers