magnum plots

Dear K,

When I was young my teachers used to always tell me to write about what I know. They discouraged me from stretching into any topic area that was beyond my knowledge. I could not write about being a 32 year old man in a struggling marriage. Nor could I write about being a sea monster trying to find acceptance in the cruel dark cold of the bottom of the ocean. All I could write about was being an angst-filled teenage girl stuck in a small Midwestern town.

So that’s what I wrote about, because that’s what my teachers wanted. I wrote about the endless cups of bitter coffee in cafes and unrequited high school love and basketball. But I still dreamed of living a more interesting life, one that would permit me to write about war or true heartbreak or all the big-hitter topics of literature. Maybe I’d hunt a great white whale or go to the bull fights in Spain.

Eventually, I escaped the misconception that I could only write about what I know in terms of my own life. The narrators shifted to become the 32 year old man, or the soldier, or the spoiled, hopelessly bored rich girl. Even though it wasn’t exactly me, it was still me. I was still hidden within those characters. Even if I tried to eliminate myself completely from the text, I’d still find my finger tickling through the letters, my hair weaved between the paragraphs, or my eyes set dark and sad in the background. And that’s when I realized that I was still writing about what I know. Always. And in a way it became a peculiar game that I played with myself. How much could I morph, how deeply could I hide my true self within the pages?

It allows you to escape a bit, to be that different person for the days or months that you are writing as a character. But it fucks up your reality. When you set down the pen or stop typing the keys you still have to return to the standard personality, the person who comes and goes to work each day and interacts with society. Sometimes it isn’t as easy as I’d like. Sometimes I show up for a coffee date still bending like an alcoholic businessman, or show up for an appointment speaking like a disappointed weatherman. It’s not so easy to shake the lives I create on the page, and sometimes those lives are more interesting than mine and I don’t exactly want to set them aside right away. It’s almost as if maybe I can eek out a little more creativity, find a little more inspiration for the text, if I can just persist in that mindset for only a little longer.

I hope you don’t get trapped in characters like I do, but perhaps we are possibly alike in this idea.

Are the sun’s rays looking longer to you? I swear they are stretching further every day, coating another twenty minutes more or so with every passing week. The day approaches when we will be able to soak in their warmth, laying on the linoleum floor in front of the kitchen windows and smiling at the ceiling fan.

Soon,
-K

To Sleep

Dear K,

I'm still in the grips of this low tide. I can't sleep. I eat and it tastes like ashes. I drink but I am still thirsty, and when I bend towards the earth I find it farther down than when I started.

I went and danced this weekend, and I drank whiskey like tomorrow was the second coming and Jesus had just said there wouldn't be any whiskey in New Jerusalem.

Send me everything you want.

I think I might want to be Kurt Vonnegut. I wish my youth hadn't been ruined by not going to war and seeing that profound demise and misery, but that's missing the whole point isn't it?

I'm not sure that I can do anything right. I feel my mind slipping away, and I'm losing my edges. I'm dying so slowly it just looks like living, and isn't that the real tragedy?

Nobody can save us. I'm not really sure there's anything to be saved. I wish we were all just dreams.

When?
K

romance to the grave

Dear K-

I wondered how long the bout of euphoria would last. You and me, we’re meant for crumbling. We dream and aspire and build build build our beautiful cities, carved from stone and forests and earth, but in the end our lovely spires will come tumbling down. Our foundation is weak. We can try to build our hopes as many times as we’d like, and maybe those glittering pinnacles will stand erect and admirable for some period of time, but eventually that foundation will give way (just as it has always and will always give way) and we will crumble.

I’ve been watching weathermen on the television sputter into icy microphones, with fogged over glasses and frostbitten peachy cheeks. The snow gusts in horizontal waves, like a wintry white wall that pulls at their furry hoods and makes them brace their feet like an awkwardly posed statue. This miserable weather allowed me to leave work early, mostly because all our patients scheduled for the afternoon decided to reschedule in light of the predicted climate. I spent the free afternoon shoveling the parking lot, because I get paid to do so. Unfortunately, it was truly a Sisyphean effort. Within minutes of moving on to a new section, the previously cleared section would be filled with two to three inches of new snow blowing in from the North. I still labored away for two hours, gaining the glittering adornment of an ice headband across my scalp where my hood and earmuffs failed to overlap. I felt no cold. It was a matter of continuing to move, feeling the muscles burn in my back as I bent to lift a shovel-full and toss it over the curb. By the end of it all, my cheeks were red like cherries and my eyes were smeared with a coal-like lining. Apparently Sephora isn’t blizzard-proof.

Hold on tight. We’ll get through this lull. The current is very strong, and I want you to stay with me a little while. Even if it means I need to start sending you things in the mail. I’ll send you whatever comes to hand. Letters, cocktail napkins with scribbled notes, conte crayon sketches, receipts for things I bought that reminded me of you. It doesn’t matter. I just want you to feel loved. I’ll send you fireworks, city asphalt, a rosary, children’s laughter, shooting stars, green chewy twigs, circuit boards, church chimes, old currency, sweater vests, blades of grass, ocean shells, whispered secrets, fears, dreams, regrets. It’s yours. It’s all yours, if you want it. It’s all that keeps my veins pumping blood to and fro in the cold nights.

Someday the sunlight will return, and maybe then I can stop running in circles. Maybe then I can run through the streets again and beat a path through the forest like I used to in Ljubljana.

Weary in the winter,
-K

Hope and Sorrow Wash over us in waves of amber and grey

Dear K,

It is late and I am depressed. I don't to die, but I'm not really sure I want to live. If I could sleep for a century and wake up from my dreams in time to see the earth get hit by an asteroid, well I think I would. I want to be fluid and mercurial and not bound to my body or the laws of reality.

I want to waste away in the real world and get stronger in my dreams everyday.

I dreamt that I was poor and driving through a graveyard with my girlfriend, and then we stopped to have a picnic lunch, and we found that one of the graves was made of quarters and silver dollars and other coins. We took them because we were poor, and I carried her giggling and kicking all the way back to the car and we drove on and made love by the side of the road, spilling all of the quarters out of our pockets onto the floor and never caring for a moment.

Once I dreamt that I was a tree, and I grew tall and strong and shot rainbow colored peppers from the edges of my leaves that exploded on contact with a psychedelic-mushroom cloud. I lived a full life and died in peace at the center of the forest, surrounded by other trees that couldn't talk or listen.

When I was six I had a fever dream that a dragon was robbing the bank where my mother worked. I woke up shouting and vomited on my bed.

I dream of things that will be and things that haven't ever been and never will be. I'm tired of what is and what can be. I want to live in the land of dreams and impossibilities.

The only question is where to find the poisoned apple or enchanted spindle.

Regards,
K

Forks, Books, and Fucking Drum Circles.

Dear K,

Today it was warm, well it got up into the thirties. I'm wrestling with something else too. Someone has come back into my life, and I'm torn between the scars and the love buried underneath.

I feel my life forking again. I'm excited to see which way it goes. Because life isn't something to be suffered, it isn't a drudgery to be borne. I'm excited for my life.

I need to leave this town next year though. As much as I love it, as much as I love home I need a bigger city, I need vibrancy and life, and that is hard to have in a town full of banks.

I miss college, and being poor, not that I'm rich but I felt like I was accomplishing something by struggling. My life is too easy here. I only have to show up at work for eight hours and they pay me. I don't have to put in the effort, but I do.

I need young people, and I'm surrounded by middle age and automobiles. I want to ride trains with strangers and get into arguments with people about what Proust really meant, not that I've ever read any Proust or have any idea what he meant, or why he would write such a god-damn long "book".

I'm trying to write again. Did you know that whiskey helps? I'm at a bar right now. My first glass of whiskey carried me three pages, and those were just sketches of dialogue, once I get back to them and embroider them I'll have nine or ten out of them.

But now there are too many people, and everybody is here with their friends, and all of mine live in other cities.

Also the people who play the drum circle every tuesday and wednesday night below my apartment are here. I'm not sure why they have their own place and their own space to play in. I fucking hate drum circles.

Regards,
K

please connect this call

Dear K-

I don’t. The days get bleaker and I get more bitter and weathered with every exposure to the winter wind. I’m faded, resting pale against a pastel landscape. I miss the sun, the summer air and the summer cares. Deep in my bones I know it will someday come again, but for the moment I ache for relief. Hours stretch into days and days into weeks, and eventually I will be old and remember all the winter days I wasted in anticipation of spring. And perhaps I will regret.

It’s funny how little things can throw off your balance. I’m a creature of routine, and I rely on stability and repetition. Something as simple as having to shift which wrist I wear my watch upon due to the bruises left by an IV needle is enough to set me off-kilter for the entire day. I look to my wrist for a sense of temporal bearings and instead I find a sickly green and grey bruise with a tiny purple pinprick at its center. My stomach lurches, I quickly glance at the watch on my opposite limb, but already I have been knocked out of step and I’m stumbling to find my rhythm. I fumble with some paperwork, drop my pen, forget to smile to a patient. My mind is still thinking about the bruises.
I don’t adapt well to change. I hate transitional periods. Lately, I’ve been feeling like this entire year is a transition, and it makes me sick.

I’m going back abroad in the summer. I plan to see Brno again…the city I loved but couldn’t have, although in all fairness I had every opportunity to take it back. I’m both eager to see it and frightened. What if it’s not as beautiful as I remember? Will I still be content to stroll its streets and admire my surroundings, or will I find it more faded and dreary than my crisp, beautiful memories? But what if I find it even lovelier than in my dreams? What if I break my heart all over again and throw my life to ruin just in order to return to its embrace? What emotion will I feel when I smell the brewery? Taste the halusky, drink a beer, amble through the Tesco, hear the fluid river of native Czech language spewing from a citizen’s mouth?

Don’t worry. It’s not a one-way ticket, and I’m being accompanied by a lover who aims to keep me settled in America at all costs. He’ll bring me back. He’s part of the reason, whether he’d like me to admit it or not, that I stayed in America in the first place. He was one tether that I couldn’t shake loose.

Be cheerful to compensate for my persistent gloominess.

-K

None of these things.

Dear K,

I've had several drafts of responses to your last couple of letters. But I'm not going to send them because they are too tragic and true. It is raining right now. January rain is a sign of hope, and I feel it welling up inside of me. I'm looking up at tall buildings with the promise of a future instead of imagining them crumbling to the ground.

Can you feel it? Can you feel the edges of your consciousness slide towards hope? Do you feel the wonderful tingling of tomorrow, as your soul bends around the other side of the world, glimpsing at the bright light heat of tomorrow's sun melting everything around us? I feel it. I feel that hope for the children playing in the street.

I've been helping homeless people eat, handing them money and telling them that they know what they need to spend it on and who am I to tell them what to do.

I feel it. I feel the hope that is Winter's secret promise. This is the only way to be ready for Spring.

Tell everyone you see that I love them,
and that none of these things
stop a brighter tomorrow from coming,

-K