Espirit d'escalier: Carousel Writing

etelephone:

cafeignorance:

To be taken up by etelephone

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PART TWO

When Tyler releases my hand, I find myself nervously tucking a wayward piece of hair behind my ear. Nervous habit.

“Duffy,” he says. “That’s an interesting name.”

I try to tell myself that the blush slowly spreading across my face is just from the run.

“So, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around here,” he says.

With good reason, I say to myself, but to Tyler say, “Oh, yeah, I usually don’t run this way.”

He smiles wide. “But, you live around here, right?”

“Yeah, not too far,” I say, gesturing toward the general direction of my house. I think about my mother. She’d be wondering where I was soon. She wouldn’t be happy to know that I was talking with a boy, especially one with as much potential as this one. She had always told me not to play with my food. “I should really be getting home…”

Tyler actually looks disappointed. “Oh, well, you should come around here more often. My friends and I practically live in the water.”

“I don’t know…”

“Please. I mean, this may seem a little forward, but you seem really nice. And you’re pretty. I’d like to get to know you.” He seems so genuine and it’s been so long since I’ve talked to anyone not trapped inside a computer screen.

“Okay,” I find myself saying.  

PART THREE

I had no intention of going back to that beach, but that night I wake up in the middle of a thunderstorm. He was right. Those were storm clouds on the horizon. I get out of bed, pull on a sweatshirt, and watch the rain fall from my bedroom window. It is coming down in buckets, the kind of rain that actually feels like being in a shower when you go outside.

It is too wet to be outside and too late, but while I stand there, lightning streaking from one end of the sky to the other, a man walks in front of my window with a surf board. He looks like Tyler except the happy, flirtatious guy I met earlier seems depressed, walks slowly with hunched shoulders. Is it just the rain? Maybe, but if it is, why doesn’t he go inside?

While I wonder he disappears into the rain. My curiosity demands to be satisfied, so I grab my rain boots, climb out the window, and take off down the street after him, pajamas and ratty old sweatshirt and all.

He’s heading toward the beach where we met that evening. I told him that I don’t usually come this way, but here I am jogging that way again less than twelve hours later. It was strange of him not to ask—why avoid such a beautiful beach?—or maybe he was just trying to be polite. I’m grateful, though, I don’t know what I would have said if he had asked about it.

“Hi, my name is Duffy, and this is the beach where my older brother died. Can I have your number?”

Wonderful, wonderful pickup line. 

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9 notes
17 May 2013
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
— William Saroyen (via glorifythehour)
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2,157 notes
17 May 2013
17 May 2013
17 May 2013

On Beauty

From Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness 

Beauty is…

A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of some of our ideas of a good life.

Beauty and Sadness 

In his memoirs the German theologian Paul Tillich explained that art had always left him cold as a pampered and trouble-free young man, despite the best pedagogical efforts of his parents and teachers. When the first world war broke out, he was called up, and in a period of leave from his batallion (3/4 of whose members would be killed in the conflict), he found himself in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin in a rainstorm. There, in a small upper gallery, he came across Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels and, on meeting the wise, fragile, compassionate gaze of the Virgin, surprised himself by beginning to sob uncontrollably. He experienced what he described as a moment of “revelatory ecstasy,” tears welling up in his eyes at the disjunction between the exceptionally tender atmosphere of the picture and the barbarous lessons he had learned in the trenches. IT is in dialog that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be sad before buildings can properly touch us.

The Absence of Beauty

It is to prevent the possibility of permanent anguish that we can be lead to shut our eyes to most of what is around us for we are never far from damp stains and cracked ceilings, shattered cities and rust stained dock yards. We cannot remain sensitive indefinitely to environments which we don’t have the means to alter for the good and end up as conscious as we can afford to be. Echoing the attitude of Stoic philosophers or Saint Bernard around Lake Geneva we may find ourselves arguing that, ultimately, it doesn’t much matter what buildings look like or what is on the ceiling or how the wall is treated, professions of detachment that stem not so much from an insensitivity to beauty as from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to beauty’s many absences. 

15 May 2013