I Wrote a Story
Excerpt 3 from a story I won't ever write.
So I showed her the symphony I had composed. I expected her to be like any other person; She would half-heartedly listen to my music and tell me "wow, that's pretty". and we'd move on.
She was different. She held on to every note, every breath, down to the last bar.
Her eyes painted the emotions I hid in within each line.
"Your music is... it's indescribable. Your mind must be such a terrible place."
I looked at her in horror. I realized that she knew too much by now.
"What inspires you?"
"W-What inspires me", I stammered, "are the things that everyone write novels about. What inspires me are the kind of feelings that people capture in music, the things you see in movies. I aim to express the inexpressible."
"What's the closest you've ever come to succeeding? is it this work?"
"No, unfortunately it isn't." I opened a new document, a blank canvas where I could begin again. "No, the closest I came was in the middle of the night once, drunk and broken. I opened a new document just like this, and I tried to write down exactly how I felt. I tried to capture every breath, every heart beat, every sensation and put it down."
"Well, can I see it?"
"You're looking at it. It was all too much, but not enough to get me to say anything and somehow the document stayed completely blank. Honestly, I don't think I could have described that feeling any better." Those feelings were elusive and impossible to capture, hiding in cracks in my soul where I couldn't find them.
So I showed her the symphony I had composed. I expected her to be like any other person; She would half-heartedly listen to my music and tell me "wow, that's pretty". and we'd move on.
She was different. She held on to every note, every breath, down to the last bar.
Her eyes painted the emotions I hid in within each line.
"Your music is... it's indescribable. Your mind must be such a terrible place."
I looked at her in horror. I realized that she knew too much by now.
"What inspires you?"
"W-What inspires me", I stammered, "are the things that everyone write novels about. What inspires me are the kind of feelings that people capture in music, the things you see in movies. I aim to express the inexpressible."
"What's the closest you've ever come to succeeding? is it this work?"
"No, unfortunately it isn't." I opened a new document, a blank canvas where I could begin again. "No, the closest I came was in the middle of the night once, drunk and broken. I opened a new document just like this, and I tried to write down exactly how I felt. I tried to capture every breath, every heart beat, every sensation and put it down."
"Well, can I see it?"
"You're looking at it. It was all too much, but not enough to get me to say anything and somehow the document stayed completely blank. Honestly, I don't think I could have described that feeling any better." Those feelings were elusive and impossible to capture, hiding in cracks in my soul where I couldn't find them.
