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+--- Thread: Needing critique! (/showthread.php?tid=21821)
Needing critique! - Sid - 11-22-2018
Hey y'all, so I have the opportunity to substitute an essay of mine with a short story. I was wondering if you guys might give it a read and help me improve it? I like it as a starting point but feel that some things are cliche or naive. Whatever your thoughts are, if any, send them my way; it would be greatly appreciated <3. The poem is what I based my story off of.
Perpetual Motion
Tony Hoagland
In a little while I’ll be drifting up an on-ramp,
sipping coffee from a styrofoam container,
checking my gas gauge with one eye
and twisting the dial of the radio
with the fingers of my third hand,
Looking for a station I can steer to Saturn on.
It seems I have the traveling disease
again, an outbreak of that virus
celebrated by the cracked lips
of a thousand blues musicians—song
about a rooster and a traintrack,
a sunrise and a jug of cherry cherry wine.
It's the kind of perceptual confusion
that makes your loved ones into strangers,
that makes a highway look like a woman
with air conditioned arms. With a
bottomless cup of coffee for a mouth
and jewelry shaped like pay phone booths
dripping from her ears.
In a little while the radio will
almost have me convinced
that I am doing something romantic,
something to do with “freedom” and “becoming”
instead of fright and flight into
an anonymity so deep
it has no bottom,
only signs to tell you what direction
you are falling in: CHEYENNE, SEATTLE,
WICHITA, DETROIT—Do you hear me,
do you feel me moving through?
With my foot upon the gas,
between the future and the past,
I am here—
here where the desire to vanish
is stronger than the desire to appear.
My mother is waving goodbye to me from the house, a wide grin plastered across her face in a way that leaves no doubt in my mind that she doesn't know. That I ever suspected her of knowing was a mistake on my part; mother dearest she may be, but never inclined to see past the brave face that makes up the very shallow first layer of my character. Her brown hair and green eyes are about all I inherited from her, the anxiety and the dissociative tendencies coming from somewhere else entirely. Or maybe I just never noticed such characteristics in her, too busy with my own mental wonderings.
In any case, she doesn’t know.
With mother fading in the rearview mirror, I turn off of the street that I’ve lived on my whole life and set out. The windows of my blue Chevy are rolled down, inviting in the warm air of summer’s last exhale; already the roads are melting into one incomprehensible mass, although it takes twenty minutes for the city roads to fall behind me in exchange for the highways. My fingers twitch against the coffee mom had insisted upon buying me (the word “coddled” comes to mind), wanting a taste but resenting its implications (momma’s boy, dependent). I move my hand and turn up the radio instead, cranking the country music that makes my tongue taste like sugar and my eyes see colours that I had forgotten existed.
Nineteen years in one city, twelve years in one school, a lifetime spent confined within the realm of a stagnant community and an overbearing mother - it’s a long time to feel separated from the people around you, who say they care about you but give no evidence of the fact. With no father to look up to or to model my behaviour after and no siblings to distract my mother’s attentions from my every shortcoming and failure, I’d been miserable. Back in that city, I had felt like a rat in a maze: free to go wherever I pleased, as long as I stayed within the maze. Fit the mould, don’t step out of time - we’re here for you, Tony. Bullshit.
I remember being twelve and coming home from school. After coming through the back door, I set my backpack down against one of the kitchen island barstools. I usually hung it up on the hooks adjacent to the door I’d come through. The light from outside filtered through the blinds on the windows, illuminating specs of dust as they floated meaningless through the kitchen, motes of celestial dust that existed exclusively because of my meager consciousness.
Meager, indeed.
When mom came home, I hadn’t moved from where I’d stood to set down my backpack.
What’s wrong, she asked.
I think I’m depressed, I answered.
Don’t be silly. It’s just puberty. She walked by, ruffled my hair, then frowned. Hang your backpack up, there’s company coming over.
I hung up my backpack, along with my will to live; or at least, my will to try.
Everything has changed now, though. As I turn on to the on-ramp which will take me to the highway (a highway, any highway), I leave my confinements behind. This journey to nowhere is my way of retaking the precious wills I had hung up on the back door hook that day. Already a feeling of warm, soothing disconnect washes over me, relinquishing me from the bonds that have been placed on my wrists and ankles every day for the past nineteen years: no mother to preen over a boy with no vitals, no work to go to on legs that won’t walk, no college to apply to with a mind as empty as space. Freedom, utterly.
For me, separation from my life is the key that will unlock my destiny… Or at least, it will allow me to breathe without feeling like I’m drowning. Or perhaps I will finally understand that it’s not air I exist in at all, but rather an ocean of disconnect whose waters I’ve no choice but to draw into my suffering lungs. Separation will reveal to me what truly makes up my character - for until now, my character has been but a shadowy figure in the stories of the people around me, and he who I see in my nightmares when I take my last breaths. I always wake up from those nightmares, though; and I always know that the person I saw while dreaming, is me.
Dreams, however, will have to wait. I’m going twenty over the limit, my hands tap-tap-tapping on the steering wheel to the rhythm of the song that’s just come on. I know without looking that a grin identical to my mother’s is widening my lips. It’s as if I, too, am somehow ignorant of the true implications of my flight from home.
I can’t help it, though.
This is a good song.
Upbeat and optimistic, the music feeds my spirit, pumps my blood, and leaves me thinking (stupidly) that what I am doing is brave and romantic: a lone hero’s quest for self-fulfillment. The lyrics convince me that maybe, just maybe, I’m not running away out of fright - that my escapism is just a form of self discovery, instead of one which will ultimately result in my self destruction. (As if I hadn’t started down that path long ago, as the dust motes had floated through my kitchen).
The song ends, and for a moment the radio emits no sound. I am suspended in that moment for a time almost immeasurable - signs pass me by, the frequency of the road beneath my tires changes as I hit newer and older stretches of highway, and my coffee somehow drains itself to the last drop. The sun is setting on my dreery trail, and still the silence wears on.
(I must have turned the radio off).
Chyenne, Seattle, Witchita, Detroit.
Later. My phone is alight with where-are-yous and please-call-soons and I-love-you-Tonys, but I pay it no mind. In these hours, my existence is peripheral: not seen from straight on… It is a kind of placid existence where no one can touch me, but I cannot touch them, either; a true form of estrangement and separation that leaves me at once elated and confused. I rejoice in the anonymity of it, of how every passing car is but another mote of celestial dust on a remote blue dot somewhere deep in a galaxy that only exists due to my meager consciousness; and yet I wallow in the loneliness of it all, frightened by the bottomless pit of my journey. Is there an end in sight? It’s questionable at best if I will ever come out of my stupendous reverie. I’ve been existing here (between the future and the past) for as long as I can remember. It makes no difference now that my separation from reality and society is physical - our bodies are only harbingers of our souls, and mine has always been terribly disconnected. Wires, crossed - and I’ve never had a knack for untangling them.
My phone stops buzzing, and I’m low on gas. The dark has come and my stomach grumbles for food. My eyes, sagging, beg to be reconsidered and heard out. The reality of it all is crushing me, crushing my elation, crushing the way I thought this would be; the way I thought that somehow, if I disconnected myself physically, maybe the frayed ends of my physical and mental self would meet up and form something whole. Wishful thinking. I float untethered now, utterly without guidance or sight, a string of conscious existence so threadbare that even if I wasn’t separated from others of my kind, they probably wouldn’t even notice me.
Just a road trip, mom, I earned it. A couple weeks, maybe months. It’s the summer, I’ve got money, I’ll find my way. I need to explore the world. To see the sights. I’ll never be anything if I am nothing to begin with.
I think I’m depressed, mom.
Don’t be silly. Don’t be silly. Don’t be silly. Don’t be --
I pull into a motel, shabbier than the ones I saw put up in my town. The last sign I remember seeing is Detroit, but hours have passed since then. My fingers find their way to the radio, and I press the knob to turn it on - but the car is off, and the silence continues. I can still taste the coffee on my tongue. I resent its implications. Don’t be silly.
I look to the motel and suddenly realize where I am: here, where the desire to vanish is stronger than the desire to appear. A chill runs through me. I’ve been here all along.
I don’t get up to go in. I have no Elroy Berdahl to watch over me and to guide me to my destiny; but it does feel like another dimension, the place where my life existed before, and where it goes afterward.
I’ve always felt separate, and maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe it’s the antigravity of true solitude that will bring my pounding heart to rest, suffocating me in the vacuum of space and time, rendering me to nothing but a celestial mote of meaningless dust.
My hunger subsides, and my eyes close. I’m not supposed to be sleeping here.
I don’t even know if I’m supposed to be at all.