Dear Guy I Was Dating...
Hi! How've you been? Actually, you know, I honestly don't care that much besides, I feel pretty caught up on what's happening in your life vis-a-vis twitter and just the usual idle gossip at the internet nerd bars, and then there was that time I actually ran into you at an Internet nerd bar, so I think we can just consider each other caught up, right? You told me how your business is doing using some completely abstract (at least to me) employee/growth metric, and I generally evaded all questions about my professional status. It reminded me of when we were together, actually. Good times.
So, hey, look, I just saw Inception and it sort of made me think of you. Actually it made me think of this thing I experienced when we were first getting together. You might not really remember this story, because you were asleep at the time. But you probably remember that, as usual, I was awake before you, and that I kept getting in and out of bed for some reason, and that this would turn out to be pretty normal. Except, and you couldn't know this because I basically never told you what was going on in my life or my head, that morning was very different from all the subsequent mornings. I woke up that morning not because the alarm went off or I was stressed out about something, which was usually why I was awake before you, that and the mini blinds in your bedroom do not keep out any sunlight, so it's pretty much up with the dawn at your place, but anyway. What woke me up was a woman's voice. She had a funny almost-accent, one of those inflections and styles of speech you hear out west sometimes, basically signifying she wasn't very educated, but was pretty chatty, and full of "character". Yes, local color, she was, though where she was talking from I couldn't place at first. She was talking about this old man who'd come into her store and bought a t-shirt. She wasn't really talking to me, but I could tell she wouldn't shut about the old man until I got up and wrote down everything she was saying. So after several painful attempts to silence this woman, I gave up. I got out of the bed and went to the other room and I wrote it all down. She could have gone on for pages the way she described every detail of the old guy. I cut her off at two, I needed to figure out what to do about you, asleep there in my bed, and my writing class that was a few hours away, and my hangover. Two pages would just have to do. Later she started talking again, and I realized what was happening. A story was developing, and she was the pushiest character and she wouldn't shut up, not until I did something with what she was saying. I didn't tell you this, but that woman in my head, chattering away so early that February morning, begat several other characters, a town, and a plot. It became a short story, and my writing classmates and my friend that doesn't offer praise for short fiction, all say it should be a novel. So that is one thing I've been doing lately, procrastinating writing a novel. So what's this all got to do with Inception? Well, it's simple: that morning I had a real idea, and it's been growing, and it can be pretty consuming, and the thing about an idea is that having one can be a lot like going insane. Cheers, Farrah
