Things I Need

“What are you doing up?”

“I want to get my phone back.”

“Where’d you leave it?”

“Daniel has it.”

“Seriously?  You don’t even need it right now.  It’s 3 in the morning, just go to sleep.”

“I have to set my alarm.”

“I’ll wake you up.  What time?”

“I need to talk to Katherine.”

“Okay use my phone and call her.”

“No, I don’t know her number.”

“Lucky for you she’s my friend too, so I do.”

“I’m leaving.”

“No you are not.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“Yes I can.”

“No you- Woah.  Put me down.”

“You aren’t going out on your own until the sun is back up.”

“But I need to.”

“You can get it after you’ve rested.”

“I have to go now.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“You do if you want your keys back anytime soon.”

“You suck.”

“Why?”

“I’m not talking about this.”

“You are gonna sit down and explain yourself.”

“I just want my phone back.”

“For?”

“For safety sake.”

“Not good enough.”

“What if my Mom calls?”

“Your phone will be dead anyway.”

“What if there’s a fire?”

“We will all be standing on the street together anyway.”

“What’s really going on here?”

“It’s none of your business.  Now give me my keys.”

“You aren’t even answering my questions.”

“Please stop.”

“Alice, what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Just talk to me.”

“Stop it.”

“If you just answer me I can help.”

“Oh my God. No.”

“What is going on with you?”

“I have embarrassing things on my phone.”

“And?”

“Daniel has it.”

“Okay.  I’ll be back soon.  Go to bed.”

“But-”

“I won’t mess with it.  Just get some sleep.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll be quick.”

“You better be.  Wake me up when you get back.”

“Only if you actually go to bed.”

“Okay, go.”

How to Date a Brown Girl (Reader Response 19)

Let me just start by saying that Junot Diaz is really important to me.  I have a long list of favorite authors and favorite books, and he is very high up on both of those lists.
Two years ago, I wrote a short story unlike anything I've ever written.  I won't call it great, because I don't know if it is or not.  I wont even call it the best thing I've written, because I don't know how to judge these things.  But it is my favorite piece of all the stories I've ever written.  I had just finished reading This Is How You Lose Her, one of many works I devoured that summer, ravenous after years of required readings and ignoring my own long list of stories I really wanted to enjoy.  That summer, I remember by the books.  I remember Father's Day, nestled on the couches of two of my grandfathers' homes, zen noise app playing sinister chimes as I worked back through the Giver series.  I remember sitting, dehydrated and ill in the backseat of my mother's car, unwilling to get out or get a drink of water  or get some fresh air until I finished the next chapter - No, now the next chapter - No the, fine, I'll get out but I'm reading it as I walk.  The summer was filled with stories that I held as if they were the blood in my veins, tracing the spines like they were alive.  They felt so alive.  This Is How You Lose Her was the first book I read that summer.  I saw a photo of the cover once online, thought it was poetic and tragic and lovely looking.  Two weeks later I came across the following quote:

“Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby's beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom.  You glance at the offending passages.  Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die.  Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.  This is how you lose her.” 

I was hooked.  I got the collection the moment the opportunity presented itself.  I did not take my eyes off the page, even when I was coming off as rude or anti-social.  I couldn't pull myself out of the stories if I tried.  And it killed me, because the character was the last person I ever would've imagined myself rooting for and I still did and I loved Diaz the more for it.

But I get carried away.  The moment the book was ending, when I felt the stack of pages growing thinner by the minute, I let the writing carry me away.  I closed it after the last page, set it down and grabbed my laptop.  And I wrote.  I wrote with reckless abandon.  I wrote with a full head and a full heart.  I wrote as if it was breathing.  I hardly knew I was doing it, but I knew I had to.  At ten pages, I found myself happy with an end.  I had characters I loved and characters I hated and words I loved and something I was proud of.  I've had two professors give me feedback on it, and no one's said it sucked yet, so I'm hopeful I got something right with this one.

I digress.  Junot Diaz is one of my favorites.  He writes beautiful and insightful stories that I can't break away from.  This story is no exception.  It features Yunior as the story's voice, the same Yunior I learned to love in This Is How You Lose Her, revealing pieces of himself from within his dysfunctional relationships.  The voice is incredibily strong - perhaps that is why I am so enamored with these stories.  Yunior's language brings Spanish, slang, and unique colloquialisms that somehow are incredibly particular but work with ease.  Reading This Is How You Lose Her exposed me to this in higher frequency and intensity, and I was stunned by it.  Speaking both English and Spanish - albeit, the latter only semi-fluently - I found myself weaving between the languages freely, without any hinderance, not even realizing these switches until I looked back later, quoting it to a friend and realized she didn't fully understand some of the sentences I read to her, even though she found them as lovely as I had.  But I think that speaks to the way Diaz writes, that he creates a character that is so rooted in his culture and community, but still universal that anyone can read him and form a firm image of his characters.

Plus, Diaz is a master of second person, something I've always found incredibly beautiful.  I can't read Diaz without wanting desperately to write my own masterpiece.  I love his work, not necessarily because his style or characters are things I want to emulate in my own works, but because he captures life and beauty and pain and everything about our world in his words and it's poetry and magic and something I can't put words to.  I mean, I might be biased, but it's hard not to want to write, to want to make something beautiful, when I read his work.  

So, you could say I kinda liked this story, I guess.  

Freewrite 10/29

The last few nights, she had a recurring ream about never getting home.  It always started with a nightmare airport experience - a freak blizzard, and epidemic, a terrorist plot.  Somehow, she always got from A to B, but by the time she got to New York, or Los Angeles, or wherever the hell she was, she was wandering around trying to remember where exactly she lived and - this building looked close, but the shutters were the wrong color.  Or she'd get in the taxi and when the driver asked for the address, she'd try and scrape it off the tip of her tongue, but it never came out of her mouth.
See it wasn't really about getting back home.  It was finding home in the first place.
When she woke up in his apartment, after a night of comatose sleep, she caught a glare from the window that made him look just a bit softer.  Just a bit sweeter.  That's when she remembered the dream ended safely.  In a warm bed.  At a family dinner. Or on a couch by the fire with warm arms around her, and she wasn't quite as terrified.
Not to say that he was her home.  Because that was ridiculous.  But she was learning how to make a home.  Right now, he just happened to be a part of it.
That was all that really mattered for now.

Missed Connection (Reader Response 18)

She had fallen in love with far too many strangers.
The old woman selling vegetables in the family-owned market by the Finsbury Park tube stop.
A Moroccan man in the Costa by Trafalgar Square.
A child watching with wide, curious eyes from the window of a daycare center by her flat.
A teenager watching her phone as she meandered down High Street, looking away from it until she reached the crosswalk.
Then there was the man on the subway, the one who clutched his briefcase like the world would fall apart if anyone saw inside it.  She pictured the two of them, two brown-eyed children grasping her hands, as he kissed them goodbye each morning.  She saw him coming home, disheveled and worn, lost in his own world.  He didn't kiss her hello, only goodbye.  She took off her ring and had considered custody arrangements by the time he got off at his stop.
He was her favorite daydream.  The one she got lost in at work.  She saw him that once, but so many faces looked like his and she couldn't separate any person from the person they weren't.  She promised herself if she saw him again, she'd strike up a conversation.  But he was never there.  She thought about posting fliers, but that seemed silly.  She tried to look up him LinkedIn, but she didn't have a name or a business or anything helpful besides what train he took to work, and that's when it hit her.

Missed Connection
We sat across from each other on the Victoria line on October 15th.  I got on at Finsbury Park.  Your eyes are deep brown like chocolate, but nicer and your briefcase matches your shoes and I want to know what secrets you were guarding.  You had a book in your hand that you tried to read between the bumps, but I never saw the cover and I really wish I had.  I didn't know you were gone until the doors were closing at Green Park.  I missed my stop and had to get off the next stop and trace a new route, and I was running behind and didn't get a chance to grab a coffee, but I think if I got to see you again, I'd consider it again.  I'll be in the third car.