25 Hour Watch

I always do this.  It’s my own personal self defeating, masochistic and slightly pathetic personal history.  My parents had this record growing up (as in vinyl) by The Honeys.  A sixties girl group with that awkward, frightening hair that held the shape of a bell.  A perma-helmet.  They had this song on it, “The One You Can’t Have.”  It’s basically about what the title suggests.  Their pop beat pining for the one person they couldn’t have.  It was pretty bad.

And like a record it repeats.

I have a knack.  They’re spoken for, they’re “not looking,” they’re part of some weird religion, they’re of a different orientation.  If they weren’t, then I wouldn’t be.  And I always am.  I don’t really have a type, other than unavailable.  They’re always different.  Height, weight, hair, clothes, speech.  I bring epic meaning to the phrase “falling for someone.”  I always land, passing them on my way down, and no one ever catches me.  I kind of like it that way.

I feel like going outside.  Winter never has been my favorite season.  Every year, with the lights and the cold.  We’ve been having record lows.  Record lows.  I feel like standing barefoot on the iced sidewalk, my feet sticking to it’s surface.  My flesh at least attached to something other then itself.  My expanse of lonely skin.  I’d stand out there and watch the nothingness filling the frigid air around me, the quiet.  Standing in denial of this latest rejection.  In denial of my denial.  My breath rising to the winter stars.

And like the seasons, it repeats.

I’ve starved.  I’ve pushed.  I’ve stopped.  I’ve done everything and nothing.  And it never changes anything.  I hate working out.  I love working out.  I need chocolate.  I need broccoli.  I look at you and I just can’t look at you.  You’ll see through me.  My dilated eyes, the slight flair of my nostrils.  Color against my cheeks.  I turn to soup.  An unimpressive broth.

I loved stories growing up.  Those dark fairy tales, with knights and swords and gargoyles.  They were always fighting for something, and they always seemed so much more real coming from a book then they do in Technicolor on your television screen.  It’s always more realistic inside my head.  Always some suspenseful struggle, but I think that’s the part I liked the best.  The gargoyles don’t come to life in the light.  It’s only in the darkness.  The sun rises and they stop, frozen to their very core.  The sun sets and the stone chips away, piece by piece until they’re finally free.

And every day, it repeats.

Authors note.

With this I was trying to experiment with a first person voice, something I never let myself do in fiction.  I really wanted to focus on metaphors and voice too.  I know it’s not the most detailed, plot driven, beginning middle end piece of fiction, and if you have feedback that’s great.  And I’m not going to lie, writing can be therapeutic.