Stranger
Noun
An individual that one is not acquainted with.
I have developed a talent and honed it over the years. It is not a talent I am proud of or one that I tried to succeed in - this talent of turning friends into strangers. For some reason I seem to enjoy giving my pieces to those who will some day become someone I am not acquainted with at all.
One of my brothers has an unusual capacity for friendship--a half-dozen people he met when he was doing drugs and tomcatting as a wild child of 12 and 13 are still his friends, all respectable and settled--fifty-five years later.
ReplyDeletePerhaps he's sort of petrified in time, as he never married, and marriage, as you may agree, changes one's perspective and one's attitudes.
But I think those lifetime friendships are unusual. People change in ways that often negate the things they originally liked about each other.
I saw my best friend from 1969-73 (when he left Maine) a few years ago, and we quite obviously couldn't stand each other. His personality and confidence had somehow morphed into total egotism. I imagine he found what had been my young-man's amusing cynicism had, in turn, morphed into an old man's bitterness.
In any case, though he's moved back to Maine, I doubt we'll be looking each other up any time soon.
It IS sad!
It is sad. People rarely know what they're promising when they say forever. And there's no starting over.
ReplyDeleteThis little piece is sort of the foundation for my book, I guess. Poppy and Nigel, Alex and her mother, Alex and her father, Nigel's parents, there are a lot of relationships gone sour in this book.
I trust you'll keep me from turning into a 60 thousand word piece of narcissistic "processing" though. :)
I think the things we are going through and thinking about when we're writing always find a way into the story.
ReplyDelete"I think the things we are going through and thinking about when we're writing always find a way into the story."
Sure, though it's always nice to finish the story, pick it up after a month, and then suddenly realize it's all about X--even though you weren't consciously thinking of X while writing.
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." - Blaise Pascal
So., writing from the heart can often surprise reason....
True, but then there's this piece of sage adice:
ReplyDelete"Danielle, this is the saddest stuff in the world, but for my money a prose poem is not the way to present it to a page--only a slow percolation into an eventual piece of fiction can do that."
:)
And here you are percolating. The nice thing about percolation--percolation outside of a coffee pot, that is--is that the eventual destination of the percolating material is often a long long way from the point of origin. Which is why the well is always uphill and a long way from the septic leach field. You're tapping the well!
ReplyDelete;)
You're right. And the real meat of this story, what happens between Nigel and Alexandria, is a long ways from that prose poem.
ReplyDelete