That’s okay; we’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one.
-The Doctor, “The Big Bang”
I love that quote from Doctor Who. Its perfect. We are all a sum of our stories. I figure, as long as you’ve got good stories to tell, you’ve lived well. So, I thought that we could tell you some of our stories here, kind of a record ( I love those!). I’ve got one for you today that I don’t think even Fuzzy and BWC know about.
In the holidays between class 12 and college, I had this phase where I really, really wanted to write something. So, I have all these files with half-written journals and stories and prompts and things like that. When I was little, I always dreamed of being this, intellectual, brilliant woman who sat by her window and wrote all her profound thoughts in a little notebook that people would read for years. Oh, and her handwriting was amazing, all scripty and flowing. That probably stemmed from the fact that my writing was abysmal during this period. It was AWFUL. None of the letters were the same size and if, god forbid, I ever managed to write in a straight line, I was the happiest little girl in the world! Anyway, here’s an example of one of those abandoned stories. Its not brilliant or profound (It was in a file titled ‘Socks’) but, its something I did once and I want to remember it.
She sat the edge of her bed wearing her “cleaning clothes” that consisted of her baggiest, oldest t-shirt with some obscure band’s name on the front and her most comfortable, worn-in shorts. She had a scarf tied around her face, covering her nose and mouth. A necessary precaution seeing as how her allergies absolutely loved acting up at the slightest hint of dust. It was more probable that this would happen now when she had a big presentation to give at work tomorrow and couldn’t afford to sneeze her way through it.
You see, the Universe had a great track record when it came to messing with her. Cases in point; Pimples appearing in strategic locations as close as single nights before important events; her school Farewell, her first day at College; getting chicken pox the week of her annual exams and so on.She couldn’t take any risks.
The “cleaning clothes” were reluctantly donned that gorgeous Sunday morning on account of the fact that she had absolutely run out of space to store all her junk in her extremely ‘compact’ (read small) 1BHK apartment.
She was a hoarder, no doubt about it. She kept everything, from sentimental gifts to tourist maps of places she’d vacationed in. Cleaning was an ordeal because figuring out what to keep and what to throw away was extremely difficult for her.As she sat sorting through yet another cardboard box filled with extremely random things, she found a pair of blue socks. They were a light blue with two dark blue stripes. They had lost their color and looked like they had been worn a lot. One of them even had a hole where the pinky was supposed to be.
She didn’t throw the socks immediately into her two piles of ‘Keep’ and ‘Throw away’, which were slowly merging together anyway, but stared at them for a bit, trying to understand what a pair of socks, not one sock, that would have been normal, but an entire pair, carefully rolled up (she never rolled up her socks!) was doing in a box, which among other things also contained a comb with missing teeth, a half finished scrap book of a vacation and a door knob.
She turned it around in her hand, still trying to remember these socks and why she had felt the need to keep them. As she did this, she felt something in the sock that was not quite sock-like. She unrolled them and poured the contents of the socks on the bed. She now had, a crumpled piece of notebook paper and, of course, the other sock spread out on her bed.
Ha! I read it now and I realize that there’s a lot of ‘me’ in it. Its like that thing I read about once, that if you take a picture of someone, you take a bit of their soul as well. I guess I should write more, if I want to remember this version of me. So, yeah, I’m going to end with another promise to write more and hopefully I can keep it this time.
PS: I’m feeling sentimental today, so sue me.
I got to the bit about sneezing/allergies and went “HA!”. No points for guessing who the character is based on!
I sort of went through a phase of really wanting to write something, too (largely John Green-inspired). I had a bunch of broad themes planned out, but they sounded too…. obvious? And autobiographical. So I stopped.
Writing is scary.
And on posting more: “Hear, hear!”. 😀
😀 I knew you’d figure it out. I mean, anyone who knows me would. Yeah, I know, I sometimes write things and then just randomly realize that I was being very personal and then just stop or just become so stupidly general that it starts to look like an answer in an English exam. So, yeah, Writing is hard.
Also: *sues*.
I find it strange that we’ve all had this writing phase. (Ohhey, another post idea!)