25.1.04
This week my entry is short. This is due to my remarkable discovery that it is possible to write, without being paralysed by plot. (The Plot and I are nemeses.) One day this piece might become a story. For now, I like to think of it as a prose poem.
I tried to tell her, but she wouldn't see. The corners of her life had twisted in on themselves like roots. She had been pushed down through the earth, down beneath the water table, and she was drowning. This was not how it was supposed to be. My lungs were filling sympathetically with dirt as I tried to convince her she could not do this. She told me I did not need to follow, but she should have known, at that point in our lives, there was nothing else I could possibly do.
My life had been subterranean for so long, I thought I might not mind it. Perhaps it was my fate to drown in the red clay of Sandy's bean field. Perhaps, in the end, the Greeks had had the right idea, and it was an underground river that led to the afterlife.
I tried to tell her, but she wouldn't see. The corners of her life had twisted in on themselves like roots. She had been pushed down through the earth, down beneath the water table, and she was drowning. This was not how it was supposed to be. My lungs were filling sympathetically with dirt as I tried to convince her she could not do this. She told me I did not need to follow, but she should have known, at that point in our lives, there was nothing else I could possibly do.
My life had been subterranean for so long, I thought I might not mind it. Perhaps it was my fate to drown in the red clay of Sandy's bean field. Perhaps, in the end, the Greeks had had the right idea, and it was an underground river that led to the afterlife.
