I started a writing group. It was awesome. In our first meeting, we completed three 10 minute writing sprints, each followed by responses from peers. Here, my delightful darlings, you may find two of those creations:
Prompt 1: Picture an object from your childhood. Write something involving or inspired by it.
I’m two years old and in a swing. A duck swing. A goofy, yellow duck swing. My sister stands behind me, pushing. I don’t have a fond memory of this first memory of my life but hey, isn’t that fitting for a constructed memory? See:
I don’t actually remember being in that swing. I don’t feel my sister standing over me. I don’t feel what it’s like to be bald and big-eyed and have my lips puff out like Alec Baldwin doing a Trump impression. I can’t. It’s not a real memory. It’s a memory of a picture my mother (father?) took. A picture I’ve seen countless times and incorporated so much into my being it’s become what feels like my earliest memory.
I feel sad when I think about it.
It feels like the outside looking in, interposing on me in a nonconsentual way. Like we’re born and we die and in the middle we waffle around, buffetted and muffeted and ruffeted and scuffed by those bigger or stronger or wiser or older or first. Just first. Because first isn’t even a legitimate benefit. First is just first. It’s born at the right time or the right place or to the right sister or parents. And that reminds me of the melencholy in the world and that makes me sad.
I look back to that picture—that swing where I’m dangling form the ceiling, suspended in some ridiculous duck swing and I’m reminded no person is alone. No one is an individual. No being lives in true isolation.
Still, at least I was supported.
Prompt 2: Remember a time something made you angry. Like a 6 out of ten. Dial it up to an 8. Now a 9. Now a 4. What would it be like to live life feeling that level of angry in that situation instead?
“What is sanity?” The blue shrimp told me.
It was tuesday, and tuesday is when the existentialists meet.
“I don’t know, but he does,” he replied.
“You can’t reply to yourself,” I told him, “It’s against the rules” and that’s when it
broke.
It shattered to tatters as my grey matter splattered.
What’s it like to be an honest orange?
How do orangutans pick a hand?
What’s a perspective and how does it–?
Can I please have another? or another? Or a hug.
I don’t find myself flying most of the time.
I don’t find myself crying most of the time.
The words come in and I grasp what I can.
Most tunas escape their captors. All salmon some day die.
“This got weird”, I want to say, but then you’ll know that I could’ve stopped it,
and we forgive those that can’t help it while
lighting aflame those that can.
What is responsibility?
What is it to be mean?
Julian Wise 