This is my first attempt – ever – at writing flash fiction.
“Oh, shut up! You wouldn’t know a fucking thing about how to beat these guys, pretty boy.” Lorali snarled to the boy on the stairs – I still didn’t know his name. He looked at his friends and laughed. “I don’t owe you shit, boy,” she continued, “and I’m never gonna finish squeezin’ my arms around the truth.”
I was struck by the last expression as I remembered where I’d heard it before.
I moved closer to Lorali and whispered to her, the first time I’d dared get so close. “He’s the one that did that to you.” She looked at me in surprise and didn’t have time to cover the pain in her eyes. Suddenly her cruel features were made soft.
I am a Midwestern woman, born in Chicago and raised in St. Louis, now living back in Illinois, across the river from St. Louis. I am doing a Pinterest board on St. Louis, about different things and places I love about this city. Though I don’t have any personal allegiance to this, I think I would be remiss in NOT including something about baseball because it permeates so much of the city.
As a child of St. Louis, I am aware…. of the Cardinals.
It’s almost two months that I’ve been married, and last night I did a memory book of the detritus I had collected during wedding trip in Disney World. (Yeah – I’m a Disney bride.) Now I’ve got my Sherlock pipe and I’m ruminating on things that are different now.
One big change since I got married is that people respond to me differently. When I called him my “boyfriend” or “fiance,” they responded less seriously to it than when I talk about my “husband.”
For example: “I need to talk to my boyfriend/fiancé” about a decision means they’ll keep talking to me about it. When I say, “I need to talk to my husband” about the same decision, they shut up. Like they respect the role of “wife” more than “fiancée” or “girlfriend.”
Anther difference, and I’m sure this is normal, is that I’m thinking longer term. Will we buy land? What kind of house will we build? Where? Can we raise a family there? The cool thing is, I’m thinking about this stuff, and I’m not freaking out. I’m a bit of a commitment-phobe, so this is a big deal.
I know yet even more what I want: I want to build a tiny house. I want to write more, a book. I want to live more in faith. I want to act in the Renaissance Faire. I WANT to do these things, even though I may miss on something better that comes along. For so long in my life I’ve been drifting around hoping to catch the Better Thing that people stumble onto, but now I don’t think that’s real. I don’t think Something Better will come along. Maybe it’s all Better. It’s just a choice.
Moreover, I’m not afraid to try things because I know my husband is behind me, is with me. Which brings me to my last point: I’m not alone anymore. I was so alone before him, and I didn’t even know it. What a wonderful discovery, and even better that I can make it with my Cohiba.
Neither of us are alone anymore.
Update: I also second everything my Texan sister said. (Except for the surgery on the honeymoon part – that sucks.) How funny that we posted this on the same day!
As I talked about in my 36/36 challenge, one of the things I wanted to do this year was scrapbook my wedding memory stuff. Not the photographs, per se, but the cards and other little odds and ends we had gotten over the course of the (barely) year that we spent planning it. So really, it’s a memory book, not a scrapbook in the traditional sense.
I saw this on my reader tonight and was instantly whisked back to… 2005. I went out with this guy (veeery much older) who, I later joked, didn’t know that Winger broke up. Like, he pulled a chair out for me once, and the oil from his curly mane of hair was still on so thick that I could see it on the plastic when I sat down.
Oh,
Winger
, it’s only natural that when you’re listening to a song or singing along to a song that you, consciously or unconsciously, take on the persona of whoever’s singing it or the character who’s singing it. And I’m sure it says something about me that when I wasn’t paying enough attention to the lyrics, which was often, and was the case with this song, that I was always assuming that the heartbreak or broken hearts or whatever mentioned in the title or the chorus was directed at me. Unless I was paying attention to the lyrics, it never occurred to me that the singer could be the one who was doing the breaking of hearts.
Like when I just listened to this song for the first time in years, and I was actually paying attention to the lyrics, I was suddenly like “Oh, wait, so you’re kind of…
This is a weekly post I do to highlight blogs or bloggers who have inspired me in some way during this week – another car on my imagination train!
This week’s inspiration focuses mainly on prompts, suggestions of things to write about and do. The first I have already explained, the post that inspired the 36/36 challenge by Lady Kell of Kincavel. I’ve already determined my own things to do this year (wrote about here) and I look forward to getting to them! Wanna join me? It’s easy – make your own list and then tell me in your comments so I can cheer you on and get inspired by you!
Like many of my fellow writers, I enjoy a good prompt. (Sometimes the ideas swarming around in here are too much to organize, and we need a filter to streamline them!) I found a blogger who is doing a 52 goals in 52 weeks challenge, and I’m going to copy it, do something like that.
Since we’re in the middle of April, there are 36 weeks left in the year, and I’m going to take on 36 goals in 36 weeks. I like that number. It’s the square of 6, it has balance. So: 36/36 Challenge.
I have decided to change my blog name, and have taken several days to figure out the best one.
My blog isn’t scary, but I’ve used a similar chart.
(On a side note, I’m also changing my maiden name to my married name, which is a pain in the ass, I’m here to tell ya. What I don’t understand is why groups OTHER than the social security office and the DMV want to see my marriage license. If Illinois and the United States have already checked to see that I’m married, why isn’t that good enough for you? Infuriating.)
But I digress.
In an effort to focus my blog brand, (thank you zerotohero challenge by wordpress) I am changing my username and the name of my blog to something more in line with my mission.
This is a weekly post I do to highlight blogs or bloggers who have inspired me in some way during this week – another car on my imagination train!
As you may or may not know, to make the most of my interest in relationships,to stimulate the research corners of my brain and to give legitimacy to my findings, I have been trying to get into a PhD program for the past two years. I have been turned down from 18 programs in total, both in social work and in social psychology, and I’m bummed.
Oh,
I Didn't Just Wake Up This Morning With A Craving 