Little Cuts: Stories in the Present Tense

I’ve been beating myself up for days. Mumbling snide remarks under my breath and flinging noxious looks at my reflection on shiny surfaces. This happens to me every once in a while. I feel listless, heavy and useless for weeks and then one day I wake up strong and smooth like a tarantula after a good old molting phase: minus the fasting, unlike my fury counterpart I eat when I’m fixing to shed some dead skin.

It all comes down to one thing: writing. I love it when it’s over and I can step away from a piece I’ve written and marvel at its shapes and colors. But at this point, today, I feel like everything is a beginning and there is no end in sight. Sure, I can write short anecdotes about my childhood all day but the real stuff, the stuff that will sell in book form and surly be adapted to a screen play, hurts to even think about.

I started a draft today, gently scrapping and excavating the petrified fossils in my chest and nearly threw my laptop across the room. See, I can’t get through the words without crying and when I withdraw and simply write facts it all sounds robotic and calculated. I either need to go to therapy or start drinking heavily because this is getting ridiculous. For the time being I'll just retreat to the safety of the now and less painful: this blog.

I wish I could just blog everyday but when I write, no matter what it is, I get caught up in what feels like a sandstorm of blinding emotional turmoil. When the words finally decide to settle in nicely and stop sounding like meat hooks grating against my brain, after I’ve smoked too many cigarettes, sucked down a pot of coffee and realized that’s it’s 2pm and I’m still in my pjs, it hurts to throw that chunk of myself up on to the internet for the world to scan and then move on to something else. I get up from my little red desk and begin to communicate to others and myself via my finger like Danny Torrance from the Shining. But instead of REDRUM it’s READMYBLOG!

When I started writing this I had no idea where I was going or what if anything I wanted to share but now that I look up and see four paragraphs I know I have to publish it because it would be waste not to. I already feel better. Now I’ve got to go at that “stuff in the basement” and beat it to a pulp just like Rocky Balboa because fighters, well, they fight and mostly with themselves.