Alice Buell Lawrence

I worked in radio ages ago, starting off in the mouldy corridors of college radio. I found myself, as a non-religious girl, at a Lutheran school, and they were a bit strict on the language we could use on air. Not overly so, mind you, but enough. I got complaints the one time I said “bastard” on the air. It all felt so parochial.

That has nothing to do with this entry, but it does flash through my mind every time I use the word.

The other day I started writing a piece. A really brutal piece. It takes a lot of what is going on in my life now and in the future and runs it through a worst-case-scenario blender. I’m trying to do three things at once with it, and I’m trying to use verb tense as the primary means of keeping my reader somewhat anchored. It’s just mean all the way around. I refer to it as The Bastard.

I’m slowly, grudgingly editing the thing. It was one of my 2100 words stories, and it will probably grow a bit yet before I do a real hacking edit. It’s a piece I’m afraid to share with anyone, including myself. I don’t write horror or crime or suspense or anything, and yet this one still makes me look away. It is pointed in what it accuses.

Last night I wrote the antidote to it, the song “Worlds Within Worlds” by Hot Chip inspiring a midnight meditation. What it means to know your lover, to really know them, down to the tiniest detail. The way one of their socks is always twisted, or that spot near their knee they always cut shaving. That hair that comes down into their eyes, growing faster than the others or how they use a spoon instead of a fork to eat various pastas.

It’s not the sort of thing I’ve always been good at in my own life, but it’s the detail and the connection I wish I had fostered more often. The antidote is about connecting and noticing. It is a short piece. It is what it needs to be.

The Bastard is about what happens when you don’t do those things, when you bumble away, when the little things break down. The silence in between the sentences, the ones we never notice until they’re obvious. Not the ones of contentment, but of contention.

Connection has a beginning and an ending. The Bastard is an ending.