Daniel Harvey

Brief

Brief, you said, handing me the flyer as I made a beeline for the door. Keep it, you said, not feeling the need to repeat yourself now, indeed never repeating yourself. Besides, the word brief was echoing in my head already, completing your sentence as I began to search for mine. I hadn’t written a paragraph in weeks, maybe even months, let alone a short story. Had I ever written one? Of course, you said, even if it never made it onto paper. We never stop writing stories, you told me, and I nodded, as I do, even if we never really start. You’d often told me it would help - setting things down in words. Fixing the imaginary in a visual, less virtual form. Pen and paper is best, you’d said, and I’d remembered these words, when I heard about the competition and reached for a medium to transcribe my own words, my thoughts, my tale. We all contain a multitude of tales, you’d often say, and I’d think about the reasons why not more of us were artists, what blocked some of us, maybe most of us, from becoming (or remaining) storytellers. Is the shame of the human race that powerful that our innate abilities, our innermost desires and drives, become a source of embarrassment, of pain, that our tongues and ink wells dry up rather than overflowing with beauty, vitality, joy? On the wall, I point to Adam and Eve, and you nod, as you do, and for a moment we both ponder on the melancholy that could so easily, so quickly be remedied, were we to undress, to take off these fig leaves and write on them. Book leaves. Pages. Tactile memories. Truths we can touch. Feelings unleashed.