My No. 1
I remember meeting you many years later.
Once we were young.
You see me as the same despite 400 pounds of plainly not.
I talk to you with a fantasy based on my younger self between us.
But you look almost the same.
I remember the electricity in the air, getting lost in familiar places.
When I remember there is box inside of box.
When you tell me about the rape I hold your hand.
Your hand feels the way it once did in mine.
I have to look away to focus first on the sound of your voice then on the path it describes.
The party. The alcohol. The drugs. The assault. The violence.
I remember a distance that came between the saying and the said, the narrowing tonal range of your voice.
Something in me died. Then this happened. Then this happened.
I cannot remember the story.
But I remember the whining of the rental car tires against the road.
Later you wrote me a letter.
I remember what it looked like but not what it said.
that's very real.
great emotion. i like how the last line seems to summarize the whole of it.*
Great mix of voice and form, Stephen. Effective.
I do like the staccato delivery of details here, the emotion given in slices.
Slices with a very sharp knife. "I remember what it looked like but not what it said." Wow!
Highest fave.
the sparse, staccato form gives this power. very emotional story raging beneath. peace *
thanks for the reads, comments and nice star things. the baseline situation this piece is about isn't fiction, but the piece itself is. this one reads quite differently than i wrote it and that interests me very much. and even though it sounds like i'm being coy, i'll defer saying more about how i saw this when i made it for the moment because the reactions interest me so much. what i will say is that i had the idea of using these tiny sentences spaced as they are as a way of moving back and forth across times because the piece is--i think---about memory as much as it's about what is remembered.
that said i appreciate all the reads and attention expended on my piece. yay!
The two things that stand out the most are the repetition of "Then this happened" and the last line, "I remember what it looked like but not what it said," which is a very well written line that, to me, can be said in similar ways about so many things. Really nice writing.
thanks very much for the read and comment, foster. in the back story, there are two different reasons for the forgetting. but in the piece they're continuous. once i let the sentences reconfigure the narrator's relation, the piece became fiction. interesting that you point to the pivot points.