Blogger Identity: Lose Yours in a Minute

Published on November 25, 2004 By TaBooTenente In Misc

You're peering too deeply into a mirror you use for shaving or for viewing the street you've already seen. You're on the street and you think you recognize a woman through the cafe window. A thought takes you but you can't remember the words when you're waiting for the "Don't Walk" sign to pass and now you're really pissed.

But the light changes and the thought goes and now you feel pretty silly. You're cooking supper. You're starting the dishwasher. You flip on the news and you want to shake the television to make the haircut on the screen learn some physics.

You're in bed with your girlfriend. You smell her; the sheets smell like her. The darkness smells like her. She sleeps, you're awake, and you can't remember when it was that she settled in, nodded off, while you continued to think the thought without the words.

You're listening to a story. The one black girl in your class reads it softly. She wrote it. She writes well. You like the story because the language feels so real. That's her voice, you think. Why does your own voice sound so narrow, so dead like brittle granite? Her left foot slips the shoe off her right foot. Her toes scatch her left leg,at the bottom of her jeans, lifting them just a bit.

You're writing at your computer. You're writing a story. You're writing a journal entry. You're writing an article.

In your story, a tiny, twenty year old boy with a balding head and trembling fingers sits on a bench at a quiet park, far from his apartment. A wind comes in from behind and blows slowly and stirs the grass with a low whisper. A discarded cigarette butt rolls between his feet, resting on one shoe, now the other, as the wind decides. The boy picks it up and places it in his palm and holds it before his eyes. He wants to smoke it. He's never smoked before in his life, but he knows that if he doesn't smoke it and smoke it now then he will not be able to return to his home. He knows it, and he knows he has no matches, no lighter, and the wind slows even to the point where the boy would think the wind has died. But he won't let himself think it.

In your journal entry, a thirty year old man with all of his hair says, "Who am I?" and you laugh because what kind of journal asks such things? You should ask these things and the journal should tell you the answer. Or should it? Maybe it is better to explain to the journal who it is. Now you're not sure. You can't remember the order of things.

"Why does she have to die? You're the writer," she says, your girlfriend, and you say, "What?" Because you had forgotten, what with the smell of apples in her hair and all through the room, as the fan blows rotating blasts of wind around the walls and the ceiling cracked and tilted on its side. You smell cigarettes, and your clothes are on the floor.

Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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Comments

nataUN

on Nov 25, 2004

i like this TBT. but i kind of want to hear more about the story. whta happens to the the bald boy?

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