air-dry

Excerpt:

March is not unkind but it is half-cold, like most Pisces men I've known. It's hard to tell when to keep the door open. And for how long.

Yesterday, the bay window was replaced; I acquiesced to letting in the bitter air oh-so briefly in order to bar the rainwater for good. All spring metaphors seduce us into sacrifice for the sake 0f...

But I'm not awfully keen on renovation, even when warring w/ the elements. I prefer patchwork, scrapyard solutions. Just Me and my subluxated shoulders.

My high school boyfriend almost broke up with me in spring 2018 because I’d opened my eyes while he was kissing me in the foyer of his parents' *redacted hometown name* quasi-McMansion. It spooked him for some reason and he scolded me.

That particular afternoon was threadbare warm, deceiving (as March always is), and he had insisted on running a bath for us. But amidst the roar of the water filling the jacuzzi tub, I’d gotten spooked staring at his parents' crisscrossed toothbrushes.

Spooked, twice over. Hence, our air-drying stand-off.

I'm pretty sure I got in the car after and drove home blasting "Let Me Go" - that early Hailee Steinfeld chart-topper - still painfully charmed by our false farewells.

//

Self-Edit

When I write about 'love' (and myself within it), what stretches across the page/screen is usually fragmented and flighty. A lot of little addendums (sidenotes), ellipses... semi-colons (which I didn't really know how to use until college).

Punctuation can confess evasiveness. But there is an artistry in/to evasiveness. Here's my short breakdown of toeing that line per my self-editing process:

There's always a one-liner I start with, from which everything grows.

In this case, the initial sentence I had in my head came from a spring equinox free-write in my Moleskine journal: "March is not unkind but it is half-cold. It's hard to tell when to keep the door open. And for how long."

This is all well and good but, soon after the ink dried on those words, I realized that I'm not really writing about March, I'm writing about the people I associate with this month and the season it heralds.

Sometimes acknowledging what you're subconsciously dwelling on while you're stringing words together tells you exactly what a sentence may be missing.

Hence, the addition of a simple simile: "like most Pisces men I've known."

From here, the undercurrents of other relationships, other spring memories are set to emerge. The subtext is set.

But first, a circuitous meditation on thresholds: doors, windows, seasons. Who/what is let in and what is thrown out?

I've been told that I tend to write poetry-adjacent fiction (another threshold to straddle). The next two short paragraphs lean into a poetic quality I deeply revere in which one pared-down phrase can signal in two different directions at the same time - capturing this crux of interlaid emotions (e.g., joy and grief, love and hate, fear and excitement).

Introducing the detail of the bay window being replaced seems to, at first, serve as simply an extended spring metaphor: enduring temporary cold, bitterness, in the promise of flowers, of no more rain. Though, at the same time, the window commentary, too, implicitly connotes a fraught, unsolved relationship dynamic: "I prefer patchwork, scrapyard solutions."

Once again, writing about two things at once. I'm both digging deeper and shying away. The pivoting and rerouting with punctuation continually emphasizes that dual orientation. I'm both hesitant and rushing. To this end, I purposefully leave in some shorthand (w/ instead of 'with'), akin to what you'd see verbatim on my written draft page: "But I'm not awfully keen on renovation, even when warring w/ the elements."

Although I want to get to the point, the kicker (for the reader's sake and my own), there's this fear of oversharing, of getting carried away by the winds of nostalgia. Rambling.

I finally introduce the surfacing memory directly in paragraph 4, but I leave some details opaque, and, thus, up to interpretation. Why did I open my eyes? Did I mean to? How did he scold me exactly? Why did his parents' "crisscrossed toothbrushes" spook me?

I think I wrote this because none of those questions have simple answers (isn't that why most of us come to the page in the first place...in embodied uncertainty). All of those questions demand more confession.

As someone deemed “too sensitive” since childhood, too intense, I’ve slightly villainized the territory of ‘oversharing' over the years. Even in my writing practice, where I tout the necessity of being vulnerable, I’m still hyperaware. I still have my guard up.

Perhaps this is why I gravitate toward shorter storytelling mediums: poetry, flash, and short fiction. It gives me the space or, rather, permission to simply inquire, to make meaning through fragments, to play with the addicting power of deciding what to say or not say.

On that note, the trouble of endings: when to drop off --

Originally, I wanted to conclude simply with the "air-drying stand-off," but my memory bridged into another interlocked recollection: me in the car that spring of 2018, cruising the residential circle my high school boyfriend lived on. I can't be sure if I'm recalling the very same day as this "false farewell," but I include it in this draft anyway, not as a stated fact, but as speculation.

Admittedly, I can't always avoid the phenomenon of actively revising one's memories during the writing process. Rewriting reality. It's easy to stretch the truth for the sake of potent prose. But here I rest on uncertainty and "false farewells," which feels befitting in a piece with an unknown fate or classification.

As usual, somewhere between fiction and poetry, I reckon again with spring, which always pushes something half-forgotten to the surface for a fresh mind/eye to inspect, to hang out to dry.