Born with a Curse (Snippet Sunday)

Every now and then, when Sunday rolls around, I look at whatever writing I've been working on and decide whether or not it's too horrid to share. Sometimes it is. This time, it's not. So enjoy this snippet, from a currently unnamed short story that I've been working on for a while.

~~

“Hey.”

            

Don’t look up. Maybe they’ll go away.

            

“Aria?”

            

Shoot. I still don’t look up. “Yeah?”

           

“You’re good at math, right? Can you help me with this?”

            

I recognize the voice as a classmate; Michael? Or maybe it’s Mason. I raise my eyes up from my desk, just enough to see the assignment he holds in his hand. It’s the one assigned to us yesterday. Despite my situation, I smirk. “Isn’t that due today?”

            

“Uh…yeah.”

            

I drop my eyes and ruffle in my bag, before taking out a slightly crumpled piece of paper. I hand it to him. “Here, just copy mine.”

            

He doesn’t take it. “Aria?”

            

Just go away. “Yeah?”

            

“Are you okay?”

            

Shoot. “Totally, why?”

            

“You haven’t looked up once since I came over here.”

           

Shoot shoot shoot! “Uh…” I cautiously glance up, careful to keep my eyes focused on his torso, then his neck, then his chin, then his nose. I smile what I hope is a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Totally.”

            

I watch as his mouth forms the words that he voices next. “Are you sure? We’ve been in the same class all semester, and you always seem a little…” He hesitates. “…Nervous. You know, like you’re scared of something.”

            

Do not move your eyes, do not move your eyes. “I’m, um, just not…really comfortable around people. Just shyness. That’s all.”

          

He shrugs and takes the crumpled up paper in my hand. Thank God. “Alright then. Thanks for the…uh, help.”

            

“No problem,” I say, my eyes already trained back on my desk. Before he can leave, I shift my arm, knocking a pencil off of my desk and onto the floor.

            

“Oh, you dropped your pencil,” my classmate says, leaning down to get it.

            

“No no, it’s fine,” I say quickly. I push my chair back and lean to the side to pick it up. “I got it.”

            

But it’s too late. He’s kneeling on the floor, his fingers brushing against my stupid number two pencil. He picks it up, lifts his head, and before I can look away, his eyes lock onto mine.

            

Time stops. His face freezes in front of me; his expression neutral, his brown eyes staring back into mine. Every sound vanishes; the chatter of the people sitting beside me, the quiet hum of the lights above my head, and the steady pounding of footsteps that pass by the open door, as students hurry to their classes. Everything frozen. Everything silent. Like we’re playing a part in a movie, and someone in the audience has just hit pause.

            

Except I’m not frozen. I blink my eyes, I flex my fingers. My heart still beats frantically against my chest.

            

Then, everything disappears from my vision. I know it’s still there, but I can’t see it. All I can see is the life of the unnamed boy in front of me, playing out at a frantic speed, my heart clenching and rising and soaring through every emotion he has ever known.

            

It’s not that bad, this time. There are no childhood traumas; no injuries or sickness or deaths in the family. My body relaxes; my clenched fingers unclenching, my static body slacking and slouching in relief.

            

But then I reach the present. This very moment passes before my eyes in a mere flash before it continues on. The remainder of his high school career passes by, with nothing more than a few broken hearts that only register as a twinge in my heart, as it flies by in mere seconds. He goes to college. He drops out. He falls in love, he gets married, and I feel my heart inflate with joy and care and the happiest feelings I’ve felt in a long while.

            

I come crashing down, however, when he catches his future wife cheating. There are screams. Arguments. My heart falls down, down, from high in the sky to the pits of my stomach. There are lawyers. Divorce papers. He moves from a gorgeous two-story house to a shabby little apartment in a busy, downtown area. He starts drinking. He loses his job. His entire life falls apart. My heart twists and clenches and I bite down on my tongue so hard that I taste blood. My throat constricts. My lungs begin clawing for air, but I can’t grant them their request. It feels like every inch of me is on fire as I’m dragged through the last few, lonely moments of his life.

            

There is pain. There is darkness. And then, with a jerk, time resumes, as though it had never stopped in the first place.

            

The boy’s brow furrows in confusion. “Woah, hey…are you okay?” he asks.

            

“Yes,” I croak. Although I can already feel the tears running down my face.

            

“But…but you’re crying,” the boy stammers. He’s still holding my pencil. He’s looking me up and down. He’s trying to figure out what happened. I can tell. They always try to do that.

            

“I’m fine,” I mumble. I keep my eyes trained on the floor as I stand up. My hands fly across my desk, shaking, as I struggle to gather everything into my arms. Stray papers fly out, drifting slowly to the floor, but I make no move to pick them up. I grab as much as I can before pushing past my classmate, dodging desks as I rush towards the door.

            

Before I can abandon the classroom and enter the diminishing crowd of students in the hall, I collide with someone at the door.

            

“Woah!” an unfamiliar voice rings out. “I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

            

“I’m fine,” I say again, automatically. I push past him and leave, not even daring to look up in fear of what I might see.

The Importance of Flexibility

"Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life."
                         - Lawrence Kasdan


The above statement couldn't be more true. And you'd think, that after 13 years of having homework, that I'd be used to it--or at least able to manage it.

HA.

The funny thing about doing what you love is that finding the motivation to do it is no easier than trying to find motivation to, say, clean a toilet. Just like with anything, I seem to find excuses to do pretty much anything else; I have to clean my room first, I have to do laundry first, I'll just take five minutes and read a bit before I start. (Note: There is no such thing as "only five minutes" when it comes to reading. Either I don't read at all or I sit down and spend twelve hours reading a book cover to cover.)

It's not that I don't still enjoy writing; once I actually start, I can go on for hours and have a lot of fun doing it. It's getting started that's the issue. Because no matter how much I love something, I will always love Netflix more.

That's why I need to be flexible.

I need solid writing time. I need to schedule time for writing; to write it down on my calendar, like I would for any shift at my part-time job. But my job schedule is basically unpredictable; sometimes I work 5 days a week, sometimes 6, sometimes 3. Sometimes I work 30 hours, other times I work 44. Sometimes I start at 4, sometimes 5, others I get asked to come in at 1. Sometimes I plan to write, only to have someone invite me for lunch or to a movie, and I end up abandoning my laptop to go have some fun.

This is where flexibility comes in.

I wish I could pick one time of day that I could always have to write, but that's just not possible. I need to work around my schedule, and change my habits to fit my life as it changes around me. I need to change as my priorities change.

Changing is hard. A lot. I definitely work better when I have a solid routine to follow, and straying from said routine brings little productivity with it. I need to schedule time as it becomes available, and set it far enough in advance that I know that it's coming.

But as important as my writing time is, I need to know when to keep it, etched in stone, and when to toss it away, in favour of valuable time with friends and loved ones--and just plain down time in general. (We all need our Netflix fix every now and then...wow that sounded awkward.) Even if I do have "homework" every day, that doesn't mean I have to sacrifice everything else in return. What would be the point of that?


Until later,

- Justyne

Courage

Writing is sometimes the most courageous thing I can do.

Writing has never just been something I did; it's always been something important to me, and something that I knew I would one day pursue as a career. (If I'm being honest, I pretty much started pursuing it the second I started.) When I was younger, though, writing was often a lot easier than it is now.

When I was younger, I was more courageous; more confident. I thought I was the best writer there was (a thought I wish I could think now), and everything I wrote, I wrote fearlessly. Now, even getting one person to read my work gets my heart thumping with nervousness.

I've realized over the past couple of years that some of my writing is actually very personal. When I go back and read some of the stuff that I wrote during the harder and lonelier times of my life, I can see all of the emotions I was feeling at the time woven into it. All of my fears were written into the conflict; the things I wish I had the courage to say were spoken through the main character's mouth.

Although the majority of my writing isn't quite as personal as it was then, a lot of my stories are still inspired by my life. Not real life events, per say, but plots inspired by emotions I've felt in the past, or by daydreams of things I wished would happen to me. (I zone out a lot so this happens more than I'd like to admit.)

Regardless of where it comes from, I still immerse myself completely in my writing. Each piece I write has some form of me in it; my history, my personality, my dreams and fears and wildest fantasies. Sharing them is hard, sometimes, even if no one knows that they're there.

Writing is my way of speaking to the world. Writing is my way of being brave. Because my writing is me, in my simplest and truest form.


Until later,

- Justyne

Journaling

I kept an extremely updated journal when I was younger. A freakishly updated journal, actually. Nearly every day I would document pretty much everything that had happened to me. If I went a few weeks without writing, I would make a point-form list of all major events in my life.

I look back and I read those journals sometimes. Then I laugh because I'm so lazy that I would never be able to keep that up now. (I also wonder why I did that to begin with because wow was my life ever boring. Still is, to be honest. And yet, you still read my blog. I'm touched.)

I still keep a journal. Needless to say, my journaling process has undergone a massive...renovation.

As time went on (and I got more and more lazy), I stopped recording every single detail about my day, and started limiting myself to the bigger, more relevant events. (Also to-do lists. Lots and lots of unfinished to-do lists.) Now, I barely ever write anything about my life. I normally only write about life events if I really have something to rant about. (I think my life is sufficiently recorded on the interwebs, anyway.)

Now, I mostly use my journal for lists. To-do lists, book lists, resolution and goal lists, even the occasional shopping list. Sometimes I write portions of my stories in my journal if I'm away from the computer. Normally they're filled with ideas that I scrawl down at 2 AM, when my mind is racing from the adrenaline of a new story and I'm unable to sleep. My journals now fill up much more slowly, but I feel like they have much, much more important things stored within them.

Even though these pages no longer store the most detailed events of my life, they store the smaller, seemingly less important things that mean so much more. Out of context, they are nothing but lists and fictional places that mean nothing to anyone else but me.

But they are me. Hidden among the grocery lists and things I intended to do but never got around to, between the lines of every world I write about while everyone else is asleep, is me. My life, my feelings, my hopes and dreams and fears.

My journal can say the most about me, without truly saying a single word.


Until later,

- Justyne

New Year's Resolutions

Don't lie to yourself, you know that you have them. Somewhere, buried deep within your room, is a list, with the title 2014 Resolutions scrawled across the top of the page in your familiar handwriting. You can joke about it all you want; about how no one ever keeps their resolutions, how everyone ends up making the same resolution just about every year. You can claim that you don't have any.

But I know. You're secretly planning to turn your life around this year. Don't even try to lie to me. I can tell.

I don't know how many times I've written, somewhere in my journal, that "stop procrastinating" was my New Year's Resolution. I think the longest I ever lasted was a week. One week, out of the whole 52.

What does it even feel like to accomplish a New Year's Resolution? Does it count as a failure if you quit after the year has ended? Does fulfilling your resolutions bring you to some magical, unicorns-and-rainbows place filled with happiness that teaches you the true meaning of life? Has anybody reached this glorious utopia?

Who even decided that January 1st was the perfect day to change your life? I can think of a million better days--your birthday, the first day of school, pretty much any given Monday of the year. January 1st is the one day of the year that most of the population is either hungover or sleep deprived--usually both. I don't think very many people will be all gung-ho about going jogging at 6 AM.

Resolutions are too sudden of a change. The word "resolution" makes me think that I have to change my life the very second the clock strikes midnight on December 31st. That's why so many people give up--you go from laying on the couch marathoning Netflix shows, pigging out on popcorn one day to running a 10k marathon the next. It's like whoever thought this whole concept up did it on purpose, to watch and laugh at us from afar as we try hopelessly to change our lives in the course of one day.

That's why, this year, I made two separate lists: one of "Resolutions"; habits of mine that I want to change or adapt to, and one of "Goals"; things that I want to accomplish this year. My resolutions are definitely smaller, and fewer than any list I've made in the past. My goals are long and plentiful, but that's okay. Because my goals aren't restricted to being accomplished by January 1st, or worked on every day of the year. I have a year from now to finish them, and finish them I will.

As for my resolutions, well...we'll see how that pans out.

What are your New Year's Resolutions?

Until later,

- Justyne