Wave (i)
He felt it roll over him in a wave; the realisation that a story was coming. It was like standing on a beach, staring at a huge, overbearing tidal wave as it builds up higher and higher in slow motion, white horses straining against blue reigns at its crest. He had had dreams like that as a child. He had feared then that the wave would sweep everything away, or sweep him away, and drown him or leave him alone. Now he welcomed the wave, the metaphor, the coming story.
He didn’t know yet what the story would be. He had no ideas for narrative, character, themes, only a mounting array of sensations, images and details. There were a lot of details he could use, like the gnarled horse-chestnut leaves decorating the pavements, like cardboard pumpkins decorating walls at Halloween. Earlier he had passed a people-carrier with three packs of character-branded Kleenex tissues wedged between the dashboard and the windscreen, revealing it to be a family car, a prepared car. The twisted stick resting on the dashboard of a van further down the street had been more problematic. Sentimental significance? The stick could have come from anywhere, from some remote bleak desolate tree on a cliff somewhere, or from a field where someone first made love.
Perhaps the story would come to nothing. There were so many sensations and details and images there was no way all of them could work their way into a cohesive narrative, or even several. They were all too disparate and idiosyncratically perceived. Probably they would fade away into the ether, ebbed away by distraction and the passing of time. He could almost have taken solace in that if he didn’t write it, someone else already would have, and written it better. But then, if he didn’t write, he wouldn’t have written it. And he needed to write, or he wanted to need to write, because it made him different, and sometimes being different was all he seemed to have going for himself.
He knew there were other writers out there, more than half of them dead, but he’d never met any, and so he felt it made him stand out, made him something exceptional. Perhaps he wouldn’t have chosen to be different, because difference brings isolation, being left alone, but he was different and since he was had decided to go with it and make himself as exceptionally different as possible. He felt, or wanted to feel, that he was a writer and that he suffered for his work, because being a writer was so worthwhile, so important, and suffering was attractive, always had been. If it wasn’t, then why did we impose suffering on all our heroes and role models?
Even Jesus Christ, the lord and saviour of mankind, our first action hero, had transcended his demi-God-like status to become a symbol of inspiration through suffering. Meanwhile, the Atheists had the tortured soul Batman, with his murdered parents, and before him, there had been Sherlock Holmes and his drug problems. If isolation and the enhanced sensations of both understimulation and all sensations rushing together at once, was the price to be paid, he would accept gladly, just so long as he knew someone knew; some close friends or a biographer.
He stared out across the room. Between moving, drinking bodies, a face stood out. He didn’t realise he had been half-looking for her until he saw her. With eye-makeup and chic fancy-dress she looked beautiful. He knew she understood how he thought he wanted to need to suffer for his art. He had wished earlier he was dressed-up too, so that he could have been a part of something, and for once not entirely different. He half-fancied her, tonight at least. Perhaps not just tonight; she was a part of the wave, of those mounting sensations and feelings. Like the themes in a well-written narrative, those feelings and sensations had been felt before, were now reasserting themselves. It was exciting and terrifying, as if a real wave was building and about to crash down and sweep away the sensations and the suffering of the past, and leave strewn about amongst the flotsam and jetsam a new story.
But this wave would be cathartic, it would sweep away these feelings too. Were these feelings he wanted? For her? He wanted someone like her, who acted like her, with a bedroom like hers with half-finished artworks and an E. H. Shepard design Winnie the Pooh pencil case, so why not her? Not her. He had missed the days of having someone almost-unattainable to obsess over, to fawn over and long to be with, but now that he saw her across the room he felt that sharp tinge, a bitter reminder, of what it felt like to be consumed by desire for someone. It wasn’t any better than not loving anyone. It was just different. And he was different. And she was too good for him, or too different from him. To be with her, he would have to become different, and he wanted to, to become different from himself and less different from everyone else. Before he did that, he couldn’t commit to liking her, especially without liking himself more, otherwise, how could she like him? Instead, he would just let the wave hit, would let a story trickle out in its wake, even a story without structure, character, narrative or themes, and watch the feelings leave with it as he stood in isolation, wanting to need to suffer, to be different, to be accepted.
Tags: batman, Fiction, images, jesus christ, narratives, original fiction, sherlock holmes, stories, themes, winnie the pooh
