An Excerpt

A recent excerpt from my recent writing

Hi all!

Climbing out of my Covid hole/ uninspired hole and wanting to share an excerpt from what I’ve been working on. I hope you enjoy it and I would love your thoughts.

Casey

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Starting something can feel like perpetually waking up on a school day—you’re 13 and your eyes are glued shut with sleep, your mom yells at you from down the hall to hurry up but you have no grasp on what time it is- what day of the week it is. Another day of defining yourself to the world. Every morning your skin cells are regenerating so fast as if you are a burn victim, your body is trying to make you whole again—to cover up red muscle and blood so raw underneath. You feel sick but it’s nothing a Pop Tart can’t help. 

In most ways, I was still 13 then. I knew nothing. I still felt like I had a teenager’s brain at 21. I was obsessed and ruled by the want of true love yet I had an endless need for attention which translated into sex with guys in the film school. I wrote in front of people every day in my journal, thinking I looked older than I was. My hair almost hit my waist then and I would push it up over my head in an act of exhaustion when I was thinking, letting it fall whichever way in front of my face. Beautiful, I thought. I just knew I was on the precipice of something—anything. I wasn’t sure if it was that love, a best friend who would appear and change my life for the better, or if somehow I was about to write the next New York Times best seller (with my 60-odd pages here and there that were scenes more than anything, just to get the grade), but something was sitting inside of me. 

On the train from the Loop to Logan Square everyday I’d listen to “Mama You’ve Been on my Mind.” I was waiting for someone to walk through the sliding metal train doors and sit down beside me with a stern face and in a sweet, soft voice, tell me exactly what was going to happen next. It really could have been anyone and I guess that’s where the danger started. It could’ve been one of the lonely young male professors I knew. We all knew them—sporting continual eye bags and bad haircuts, hungry enough that their body was trim, a shy, trusting smile hidden by beard scruff to let the young women in their class know, “I was once you.” It could’ve been him—I would’ve folded right into that trap and in all accounts, it may have been safer than what actually happened. The young professor would say something like, “There’s a bar real close to here if you want to get off a stop early and talk about those last pages you turned in.” And I would’ve been done for. Swept up in my own Graduate fantasy. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme. Bookends. But it didn’t happen that way and in another universe, sure, it did. Aliens exist there too. But here, in this universe, I met Miles. 

His first words to me were, “You’re going down a weird path.” I was sitting cross-legged in a plastic chair on the 12th floor of the State Street building at our college. Class had just finished and I was folding up papers into little horizontal hot dogs to fit into my stuffed tote bag so I could get to the train sooner rather than later. I was sick of class and I was sick of writing at that point. I looked up at the voice filtering down to me.

“What?” I had no idea what he was talking about. 

“That story you’re working on. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t think it’s the right kind of thing for you to write.”

I had recently been trying to write something more lighthearted for my senior capstone class in the fiction writing department. I was straying from my usual about nuclear families in the 60’s and the Vietnam War. I wanted to write something fun—something that fit the actual experience I was having as a 20-year-old in Chicago. 

The first line of the story was, “Every guy I’ve ever slept with has had a 2001 Space Odyssey poster hanging in their bedroom.” My professor, one of those slightly handsome male professors, loved it. He thought the voice was “new” and “inspiring.” So when Miles came over to me, never having talked to me before, and shared his opinion, it didn’t mean much to me. 

“That’s bold,” I said, continuing to take my folded papers and slide them one by one into my tote bag so they wouldn’t turn into a crinkled pile. There was no answer but I still felt him standing there so I looked up. He looked scared like he regretted saying anything but instead of explaining himself or backtracking, he just shrugged his shoulders and stared directly into my eyes. 

I broke the eye contact and said, “It is different. You’re right.” 

“It doesn’t feel like you,” he said. 

I met his eyes again. They were still scared. Light blue and swimming as if tears were going to build up because he’d been keeping them open too long. Like the light of the room with the afternoon sun coming in hurt him. 

Miles did not know me at all at this time. He didn’t know what “me” was. We had had this capstone class together for the last couple months at our small arts college but I always knew him as the guy who got up and left class really quickly when it finished. He never stuck around to chat like the rest of us did. He never came out to lunch with the small group of us in the department—long lunches where we talked about each other’s short stories and forked pad Thai off each other’s plates. He never came to the parties we hosted on Thursday nights, usually taking place at one of our apartments, where we’d all drink red wine and lie around the given living room telling long arduous stories about some sexual experience or childhood memory. No. He got up quickly, flung his Reckless Records tote bag over his shoulder, made no eye contact with any of us and left the room and got into the elevator like it was nothing. 

The classes we all had together were four hours long each. We sat in a circle in plastic chairs the whole time with no laptops, no tables, just our baby-bird bodies facing each other. The professor would choose someone’s work to read out loud and we’d all listen intently, resting our head on our hands and furrowing our brows. Sometimes it was really good and sometimes it was chapter 43 of someone’s sci-fi fantasy novel and we had to listen all the same. After each work was read out loud, we’d go around the circle and talk in no specific pattern and “recall” specific details from the person’s story in as much detail as possible. The point of this exercise was to let the writer know what was working and staying with the reader. What was strong. 

I remember Miles’ first story in that class vividly. He was the one who read it out loud to all of us so I remember it in his boyish voice. The laughs he inserted after certain lines. The pauses he took when he thought something was particularly important. It was a story about how one night after work bartending at the Yacht Club downtown on the lake, he was riding his bike up town to Lincoln Park to meet up with this girl he’d been seeing. (He was a biker at the time so it was easy to imagine—he usually wore all black and tennis shoes and sometimes had a courier-style backpack on and a u-lock hanging from it). He was going up the main stretch of street in Wrigleyville, pedaling fast past all the bars lit up and loud, when a car ran a light and hit him. The story told of how the bike was knocked out from under him and suddenly he was waking up in the middle of the street. He woke to a woman yelling, “AYUDA.” “Help” in Spanish. He didn’t know what she was saying and he didn’t think he was badly injured at all so he tried to sit up. “NO, NO YOU NEED HELP,” the woman said, so he laid back down on the road, splayed out with multiple people looking on and his bike crumpled in the corner. He then described only being able to see the woman above him that was speaking Spanish. He described her as an angel. A heavenly creature sent from above with long, long, brown hair. When he looked down at her stomach, he saw a light, an aura radiating out of it. He followed the stream of light down and saw that it led to him. 

The main character in the story, which was Miles, realized that after being hit by the car, he could follow his own light aura that would come out of his stomach like a flashlight beam. It was beautiful and funny the way he described it. In one scene he wakes up in the middle of the night and finds the light aura shooting out of his stomach and out the window. He felt an intense yearning need to follow it, so he did, and ended up in a girl’s bedroom. He talked about the discomfort of suddenly being there, uninvited, just standing there watching her sleep, wondering if he should leave.hen she turned over, he saw that she had a light aura shooting out of her stomach and straight into him. So he quietly pulled down the sheets on her twin bed and climbed in with her. Falling asleep right there. 

His writing was massively endearing. Like everyone else in the department, I felt like I knew him before I ever knew him because of my intimate relationship with his writing multiple times a week. I watched him shift in his chair across the room for hours on end. Catching glimpses of him looking back at me. He was always wearing all black. Usually a Nike rain slicker and black jeans—like he was ready to leave at any moment. He never took off his shoes to get more comfortable during class like the rest of us usually did. His hair was blonde and bright and full. It was curly and sat voluminous on top of his head. He’d run his fingers through it and shake it out when he’d get bored in class. He looked up at the professor with a bored face and no smile. He had the face of a kid but it formed expressions that only grown men with painful experiences could make. Suffering that cradled his baby face. 

So while Miles didn’t know me, he knew my writing. Just like I knew his. When he told me my story didn’t seem like “me,” it wasn’t all that weird because I had a sense of who he was then too. 

I focused on my charm and continued looking at him and curled my lips into a wide smile and said, “You might be right.”

He didn’t smile back. He just said, “I have a couple hours before I have to be somewhere. Do you want to come walk with me?”

In truth, I wanted to be home at my apartment on the northwest side of the city. I wanted to lay on my couch and watch the Bachelor with my roommate. But I was also chasing a dream of moments like this. Moments unexpected. Moments that would only happen in movies or books or to other people. 

“Okay. Sure,” I said and pushed the rest of my paper hot dogs down into my tote bag and stood up. “Let’s go.”