joelle jots. digitally.

I’ve started writing a novel that’s making me feel alive again.
So much so that I don’t even want to post it anywhere—feels too private. And also like maybe something will become of it, in the published sense, one day?
Which is obviously exciting.

Also, remembering that an important part of my editing process is going through and deleting about half the commas. I love those little shits way too much. 

Ernest Hemingway. My favorite Hemingway short story. <3

A lot of the time, I feel like the only thing I unconditionally love about myself is that I can write.

That’s why when it goes away, it means I’m not doing so well.

            Her hands were always cold.  I tell Michael that is what I remember of my childhood: cold hands and not just when I was sick.  He says, despite everything, it seemed I had been a loved child.  I tell him my first word was “rose.”

            No matter how far back my memory goes, my grandmother always has wrinkles.  I think that’s the case for everyone’s grandmother.  Her house (it was never my house, no, nothing was ours) always smelled of something light, airy, like peaches.  I always believed she lied about my mother until I found the leather-bound notebook in her bedroom, the diary with more than half the pages torn out.  She couldn’t bear to read the things she had written and finally I believed her.

            Michael always touches my hair when I get to the part about the diary.

            My grandmother’s name is John.  Her father had named her over the phone, thinking she was a boy, and perhaps because she wasn’t what he expected, they kept it.  She goes by Jo; she has always insisted that I call her Jo.  People often assume she’s a great-aunt, a babysitter perhaps.  As a child, I know people often wondered about me. Where is this little girl’s mother?  And who is this woman who’s ordering food for her, fixing her barrettes, and marching her around the grocery store but who doesn’t seem to know her at all?

            The diary fascinates Michael, to the point where I know he wishes I still knew where it was—or even if I did, that I’d be willing to show him.  I don’t.  I’m not.  Still, it fascinates him and I can’t blame him for that.  I never even told him about the fifth page, which had a dark stain on one of its corners that looked suspiciously like blood.

(I’ve been working on this piece for about a day now, and so far, this is all I’m relatively happy with. I want there to be more, though, so there probably will be.)

I gave up on NaNoWriMo about Day 8. Sigh. Oh well.

Benji was never going to call him back.  If Mark knew anything about anything at all, it was that.  He used to keep a picture of Benji, one of those 2x2 school photos that never ended up looking genuinely akin to the child it represented but that got parents to spend obscene amounts of money to own anyway, taped right near his odometer where he could always see it.  It wasn’t there now as he drove across the bridge leading to Molly’s house.  It had probably fallen off months ago, blew out the open window or gotten lost in the throes of time underneath his seat.  No wonder Benji would never call him back.

He wasn’t going to Molly’s, not really.  He wasn’t planning on knocking on the door, anyway.  He just wanted to see.  Did Ben still leave his bicycle keeled over in the front lawn like a sick animal?  Did they still keep the living room light on all night to ward off break-ins?  Did the house still look like home?

And then there was the fire damage, of course, the blackened siding near the kitchen window.  It had been a small fire, the firefighters had said.  Contained, they might have said.  But Mark had been busy scratching, scratching, scratching at his skin, trying to explain to them, to anyone, that it was the bugs, he was trying to burn the bugs, not the house.  Small fire turned to arson, which turned to an arrest and rehab and, most recently, the divorce.  And Benji, never returning his phone calls.

Mark was clean.  Sometimes he let that realization sink in.  I am clean.  I am clean.  It did little.  And although he was clean, and had been clean for six months now, the bugs still posed a problem.  His rehab coordinator, after declaring him cured, gave him a psychiatrist’s office number and urged him to call.  ”It can’t hurt,” she’d said.  He didn’t know where that phone number had ended up.

It was cloudy.  The streetlamps were more spread out in this part of town.  He thought about how, in some countries, they used blue street lights to cut down on crime.  Mood lighting. Or, perhaps, to remind people that police could always be watching.  People even committed suicide less in places where these street lights shone.

And then he jerked the steering wheel to the right and crashed into the guard rail.

His car spun a few times in the street, then stopped.  Another car rear-ended him almost immediately.  Such horrible sounds.  A horn was blaring.  Mark turned off the ignition.  He seemed to be in one piece, but his neck hurt.  And the bugs were still crawling, of course.  He scratched at them a little, getting out of the car.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” a voice hollered from the car behind his.

What a question.  Mark couldn’t see the driver’s face.  It was too dark and their headlights were still on.  The bugs were multiplying.  He looked down and gasped.  He couldn’t see his clothing or his skin for all the bugs that were covering him, engulfing him.  The itching was unbearable.  He tore at his clothes, his flesh, ripping and tugging until he was completely nude and even that didn’t help.  They were still on him.  They were still on him.

Mark crossed the median separating the lanes of the road.  ”Hey!” the bodiless voice called.  ”HEY!”  He ignored it.  He could do that, now.  He could do this.

He saw a minivan careening down the street.  It could have been Molly’s, except it was white.  He couldn’t stand the itching.

He stepped out in front of the van.  Right before the black, the bugs disappeared, and he smiled.

I HATE THIS STORY I HATE THIS STORY I CAN’T DO IT I WON’T DO IT YOU CAN’T MAKE ME I’M JUST GOING TO KILL OFF EVERY CHARACTER OUT OF PURE SPITE AND HATEFULNESS FUCK THIS

Home.  I stopped writing.  I didn’t really know who I was trying to fool.  Assuming I survived, assuming I completed my mission, I would also need to assume there was anything to go home to.  I didn’t have a home; the Vices made sure of that when they killed the Doritys.  They burned our farm, our house, even the forest nearby to ash

It wasn’t just about the place, I knew that.  It was about everything—who I was, what I’d been trained my whole life to do.  If I succeeded, what kind of life could I possibly live?  What kind of world could I go back to?

I was an instrument, I knew that.  I just didn’t know what kind of life an instrument could lead when its purpose was gone.

I’ve decided, finally, to do NaNoWriMo. Technically, I’m using parts of stuff I’ve already written, turning the disjointed paragraphs I already have into a novel. I know that’s against the rules but I figure as long as it gets me writing 50,000 words, who cares? Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo this year?

I wanted you to come home and blind me with your palms pressed against my eyelids. It was just something about the air, the season, the way my mouth twitches at the corners when I’m about to lie. Mornings rise too soon in this town, but we’ve known that from the beginning. All we can do is count backwards from infinity to zero like it will change dawn’s mind. You wonder why the nights make me nervous; what about inevitability shouldn’t make one nervous? Your hands felt warm and familiar against my eyes, did I mention that? Sometimes it’s comforting when just one person doesn’t expect you to see.