Metaphor

Lately summers hang above me like one long sheet of unbroken satin. A man I don’t really know tells me he thinks I’m a sincere, vulnerable, messy, unusual person. Another tells me I have a top-tier ass.

I am writing a story. Because I am always writing a story. I am writing one about flames and drafting one about snow. I am crafting a story about burning passion that threatens to engulf two people and one about slow crawling cold that draws two near.

When I write each story I know they could be good, if only i could figure out the things I need to tweak. I can see the shape and the structure; identify the narrative flows and dips in story telling. I can tell when a sentence is well crafted and when one is over-crafted. I reread each passage, striking words and sentences; rewriting similes and adjusting metaphors.

I am trying. Hard.

Years ago, after a bad breakup which seemed to divide my life into yet another before and after, I came to the conclusion that I actually do have suffer from summer seasonal depression. Not that I don’t suffer from yearly depression, but the heat and bright lights of summer crank it up. I spend long days inside my house, pacing around the living room or back and forth between my office computer and my needy pug, hoping to find something to distract me from the slow crawl of yet another day.

In my snow story the main character works at the Holey Grail (a bad attempt at a gay bar pun) and is sent on a quest for their fictional knight in waiting after a spiritual healing session. In the snow story, the main character works as a memory massage therapist: pulling bad memories from the body and storing them in relics.

I first thought of the story as an excuse to dive into a sort of fantasy motif, drawing on my experience playing D&D and other high-fantasy video games. I imagined it also as an inverse of the prototypical adventure story where the knight searches out the princess. In this case, the knight’s desire for attachment is stripped, accidentally from him, and it’s up to the witch-doctor to bring it back.

In my snow story I write:

“In the winter of drought and dying marigolds, the downtrodden men came to me, parched and seeking relief.”

and

“Men, I found, could not be reduced to a simple stereotype. Undressed and bare against the dark, each one contained a string of vulnerability. With practice, I could pluck it from them, drawing out the long ribbon of trauma or disdain, self-hatred, or denial that lay coiled deep in the caverns of their muscles for safe-keeping.”

and

“The body,” I continued, “is like a nesting doll. The outside frame housing a series of inner selves, each tinier than the one before, more delicately printed with patterns and designs. There is no telling how many are hiding; each person is different. Some are better at crafting their selves than others; with delicate and precise fingers, they print intricate designs on their inner selves and with broad flourishes, adorn their outside selves with thick globs of paint. Once you start digging, you must keep going, though, the mind does not like stopping midway through.”

Though I am not sure how much of each I believe in.

There is no conclusion here, just a long unbroken thread of related thoughts hanging over my writing like an overworked metaphor.

In my snow story I write:

My living room was a verdant jungle of stolen plant clippings and weeping flowers, swiped and nursed back to health by a meticulous regiment of water and sun, coarse coffee grounds, and neglect. The light from the street poured through mid-afternoon, drowning the apartment in enough warmth to create a rich tapestry of jewel toned leafs: emerald and ruby, rich jasmine green that unfurled into sapphire blue petals.

And

My body was buzzing, my hands shaking from the soft graze of your fingers across my back. I was white hot and wanting to be compressed by you; to strip myself and push my body closer and closer until the two of us were stitched together. And you welcomed this morbid fascination. You invited me in and held me tight, tucking me into the bed and planting soft kisses on my forehead and neck and collar and everywhere else you could reach.