I realized I just posted this without identifying it as part of Tep's Challenge.
When I hear time is relative, this is what I think:
Lunch with your friend is like a blink, easy and short.
Waiting for a bus that doesn’t arrive can make your life pass before your eyes.
Telling someone you like them ‘that way’ takes six years, especially when you think they think you’re a freak.
Every rejection letter takes really long to read because of the index of your artistic failings written in the form letter in invisible ink that you have to decode before you can gnash your teeth over them. It’s like the first time, every time.
Sometimes I’m thirteen. Sometimes I’m forty, and have lived really hard.
A good day of writing lives outside time, like a good kiss.
A bad day of writing is solitary confinement.
Any amount of time is too long to have a meeting about what’s wrong with me.(I have felt that I died in some of them, to be reincarnated as somebody who doesn’t give a shit about “optimizing” anything. It’s a miracle.)
Time really doesn’t care if you want to be in it or not.
One hour of Buffy or Homicide=five minutes.
One hour of Crossfire: 1 hard depressing week.
No worries, Deb. Take your time.
Actually, Kristin, insent.
I go shower now.
erika, by the way, you just killed me with that piece. It's very clean and pure, and unbelievably crisp.
Thanks. Funny, because I didn't write it looking for a response...just to prime the pump.
Kristin, back to backflungs.
Challenge 33: The Passage of Time (100 words)
Julia turns six, today. I resisted five with all my might, just last year. Just yesterday.
Where's that pretty newborn—curl atop her head? Where are the thighs with rolls so plump—the chubby cheeks? Long and lean, there's no waddle when she walks, although she will try to wiggle. Where'd the sloppy wet kisses go? Where's the infant who'd gleefully throw herself backwards with all her might, not giving one thought to me failing to hold onto her? Where is my baby? Who's this great, big, beautiful girl? Why am I blessed with ringside seats as she finds out?
Brynn, if Miriam Toews was your CW prof then we must live (or have lived?) in the same city... her Writer-in-Residence office was just down the hall from me last year.
drabbling
It was a high school graduation present, the best in portable typewriters. Where I went, it went. Hundreds of pages, dozens of characters, rolled from under the keys.
"Is that an electric?" people asked, awed at my typing speed.
"Nope."
College, to home, to college, then to Utah. It came west with me before my car did. It was my voice, and I couldn't leave it behind.
The keys became stubborn, ribbons became harder to find, and those new word processors caught my eye.
My left knee is resting against the case. I know how to create typewriter ribbons. The keys just need a little oil. I think I'll have them bury it with me.
