The Letter, and the Book (444 hits)
Category: GeneralRating: 1 on 4 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Day Star (View user info) at 2005-04-07 16:58:36 EDT
She gropes under her pillow and finds the book, all yellowed and poisonous. Idly flipping through, she sees stories written in classes, on the subway, sitting in Washington Square Park cooling her feet in the fountain. These things would strike her and she'd go scrambling for pen and paper, desperate to get them down before whatever it was that got her attention was replaced with something far more mundane, that guy caging cigarettes from the locals and money from the tourists, or the reflection of a store sign in a floating puddle of gasoline. Even those were throwaways compared to the contents of this little frayed book.
The book was about her, stories unfolding over pages and pages of cramped, methodical text. She piled all these words together as a way of keeping herself centered and alert. In the book she was honest with herself, and she made it her policy to never read what had come before it when she had found something to add. The idea of checking the past to write about the present seemed tarnishing and off, another little dishonesty.
There were other odds and ends living between the pages. White rose petals, an empty and flattened matchbook from a basement jazz club in the West Village, an unused bus ticket to Upstate New York, three tiny glass beads slightly larger than grains of sand from a roadside merchant in Italy, and a letter she had been too distraught to read until it had been too late. The letter she wished she could forget but it kept haunting her, sticking from the pages of her backstory like a syringe.
Once out her front door, the book under her arm and her cigarettes in hand, she sat in their little alcove, hidden from the street and rendered pale by the incandescent porch light. She smoked slowly, looking down at the cover of the motley collection of epiphanies an shallow moments perched in her lap. It felt like a textbook she would never use again, deadweight from a failed attempt at self-preservation, transparent and yet infinitely massive.
She opened the book, took out the letter and read it for the second time ever. She traced his words with her fingertips, imagined the ink being drawn up into her fingertips and making her hands burn with the sincerity of it, a sincerity she didn't at all see the first time through, after he'd already been gone for a handful of days and nothing he said to her would have mattered in the slightest. It sure as hell mattered now.
When she lit the corner of the letter it burned the most frightful shade of red, the ink adding subtle overtones of green and lavender. His words boiled away, lost to the sidewalk in one shocking moment of self-directed rage.
The book was must lighter now, filled only with the words she wanted, someday, to remember.
User Reviews
Submitted by hungovermondays (user info) at 2005-04-12 12:08:49 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
great start
pretty pic?
http://www.ubersite.com/m/64121
Submitted by Faithless_Whisper (user info) at 2005-04-08 09:09:42 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Hm. Just ok.
Submitted by ruthless (user info) at 2005-04-07 17:56:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Hmmm.
Submitted by Bayley (user info) at 2005-04-07 17:15:18 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
pretty good.