I wrote to a Mlle Bovary once upon a time.
We quickly became pen-friends, exchanging letters for several years until the intimacy had grown that we had to make the effort to meet.
We arranged to meet at Biarritz when I was on one of my trans-continental journeys.
I stayed in a nondescript hotel, and the night beforehand I could hardly sleep for dreaming. We met before the Atlantic waves under a glacial autumn sky.
She had acquired the use of the holiday home of a family friend nearby where we stayed for the week until our desire for one another was temporarily quelled and it was time to part again - back to our lives in the suburbs.
Our passionate scribblings maintained their steady flow back and forth, always promising to break away from the suffocating ties we were bound in.
But after a year the letters suddenly stopped. Maybe she had grown tired of the waiting. Had I noticed a trace of doubt that the pledges we had made to one another were anything less than complete? Or maybe it was a growing realisation that some flowers bloom just once in their lifetime.
As time allowed my memory to fade I grew accustomed to the routine of daily expectations and I grew more settled and comfortable. But this calm was broken when I received a package one day.
Inside was a delicate silver chain - her ankle bracelet. The clasp was broken and with it was an envelope containing a short newspaper report of a car accident, and the letter she'd had with her that day.
7 comments:
Nice job OP, very evocative. Didn't someone famous once say something about loving and losing being better than not loving at all, this story made me think of that.
Silver chains do break, sadly enough.
I'll have to go back to trying to complete that novel now - all those failed literary pretensions wasting away... is blogging an amusing distraction, or just good practise?
OP, if our brains are like muscles then blogging is probably the equivalent of warming up before a work-out? :)
I think it is practice, OJ. Blogging has given us the ability to practice writing the same way kids practice basketball, spontaneously engaging in spur of the moment games where the joy of the play is more important than the structure of an institution.
OK, Steve, where are you using your brain so much that blogging is just a warm up for even greater activity? This is as much exercise as my brain gets in a day.
And OJ, blogging is great writing practice. You have to keep editing yourself down and down and cutting out the extraneous crap or else you lose readers.
I would say there is no rush to finish your novel with publishing in its current parlous state. Or you could put it up as a Kindle download.
E, inventing the "next big thing" of course :)
Post a Comment