a bit on writing stuff inspired by little women

Last week/this week I rewatched Lady Bird and Little Women in anticipation of Barbie. It was Zach’s first watch and my second, and watching something a second time is always a treat. You’re able to pick up on nuances a bit more than you did the first time.

Anyway, I love Greta Gerwig: how she’s able to capture such raw emotion and love with her dialogue. Her characters can say the most inconsequential things and yet still express the fullness of their emotions. I guess that is the beauty of a visual medium where joy and sorrow and anger can be conveyed not by the perfect arrangement of words, but instead by the slight quiver of the lips, movement of the arms, and color of the screen.

After watching Little Women I started thinking about writing again. Spurred on by the scene where Jo starts writing Little Women. How she arranged the pages on the ground like puzzle pieces. I did this once in college when I was struggling with some short story or some essay (I can’t remember which) and I’ve been doing this for the last few years with a particular short story of mine, Big Bend.

It’s not exactly the same. I don’t print anything out. But I do make multiple drafts, rearrange paragraphs, and strike some out. At first, I wrote it to just be this linear thing: a couple is breaking up, shocker. Then I wrote it with these back-and-forth time jumps: a couple is breaking up and the narrator wants to kill himself (shocker). It never felt right. There was some good emotion there, something compelling to me about the inevitability of the end juxtaposed against the timeless beauty of Big Bend. A park carved by rain and water across thousands of years and now a spot for tourism, hiking, and finding yourself.

Then I tried to repurpose it as not a story of someone wanting to kill themselves but of someone paranoid about the end of the world. In that version the main narrator is hallucinating tiny apocalypses that beseech the world: floods and famines and tidal waves the size of new york. But that wasn’t right either. It was future thinking and the main action of the story had already happened. From paragraph one we know the couple is breaking up, they know they’re breaking up. It’s a ruse to placate the parents who already invited them on a trip. It’s the last vestige of their romantic lives, dying together, consciously.

So I don’t know. It’s a story about grief, which is what I like to write about. About the soul-crushing feeling of losing what seems like everything. About being lost or feeling lost but mostly about feeling empty, feeling lonely. And I think that’s why I set it in Big Bend. Sure the first draft was very much a story about what happened to me after visiting Big Bend, but that’s not what I want the final story to be. I think the whole time I was there I was marveling at the emptiness of it all. Sure there were still tourists and hikers and visitors, but there were large empty spots too: stretches of rivers and rocks and brush and dirt. The skies seemed impossibly full and empty at the same time. Maybe I felt impossibly full and empty at the same time, lonely and full of love1. Though those two things no longer seem like contradictions to me.

Try number 350 or so2

Under the stars, I stretched out and thought about home. Inside his parents were asleep and he was drifting off. Next door, the quiet hum of electricity buzzed through the house. Around back I heard a stirring and then the sound of footsteps softly approaching. 

“Enjoying the stars tonight.” Our landlady for the weekend said, carrying a torch lantern and a bottle of wine in her hands. “It’s hard to get this view back in the city. It’s the part I like best about living way out here.”

I appreciated the gesture, though wasn’t sold on the execution. She mistook me for the type of tourist that blew into the desert once in a while to find themselves.

“No doubt,” I said. “My parents had a place like this. Way out on the coast of Texas. Every night you could see the stars. still can.”

“Mind if I sit?” She asked and took a seat before I could reply. 

“Thought I could show you a bit of the park. Help you get your barrings.” 

“Thanks, I’d appreciate it.”

She unfolded a park map, weathered just a bit from use. She placed the torch on the table and started tracing lines with her finger. Across the map in bright red lines were markings and symbols, tiny scribbles of thoughts or sentences scrawled out next to rivers and mountains.

“These here,” she said tracing her finger across a group of small green lines near the entrance of the park. “Are great for a morning walk, something to get the blood pumping before jumping into anything serious.” 

“And this,” she brought her hand down again, following the ridge of the basin as it wrapped around the park. “This here is one of the harder ones, though most hikers can get up without a problem.” 

She continued the trail up the mountains, stopping at the peak before continuing her thought. Next to the line she was scrawled something I couldn’t place. A poem, a sonnet 3 had studied in college. It seemed familiar to me: the structure of it was so precise but its meaning obscured by the nighttime’s haze.

“Once you get about here though.” She poured herself some more wine, nodding to me as I offered up my cup for her to fill. “You have to make a choice. You can continue across the basin with the right equipment. It’s not a day-long hike, you’ll likely find camp later in the night. It’s exhausting but rewarding. You get to see a lot of the beauty of the park going that way. Since y’all are only here for the weekend, I doubt you’ll follow. But, it’s rewarding, worth a revisit in the future.”

“Yeah, I don’t think we’ll get that far this time,” I said and we sat in silence for a bit sipping our wine.

“How long have you lived here anyways?”

“Who knows, ten, fifteen years? Once you get to my age they all start blurring together.”

“I don’t think I’ve lived somewhere that long yet. It must be rewarding.”

“Well you’re young and it comes with age. One day you’ll wake up and you’ll realize that you’ve spent too long somewhere. Get that itch to move on. Go see something else.”

“My brother was like that.” I offered up.

“Always moving?”

“More or less. He moved a lot out of college, first to Marfa then to Colorado, then back home, before settling back in Marfa.”

“No shit,” she laughed. “I like Marfa, used to live there myself for a week. What was his name?”

“[],” I replied and she chuckled.

“Oh yeah, met him once, real nice guy.”

A sickly feeling took over me and I swallowed the rest of my wine. The way things come into contact is so strange. How two paths start in parallel, diverge and stretch out far into the vastness of the desert, turn, collide, and diverge again. So matter of fact. Like pure coincidence. Offering no greater meaning, divining no larger truth. Around us the blackness of the night was total. Still, illuminated by her torch, I could see the faint outlines of our faces and the zigzagging network of red and green, and yellow paths traced across the map. A coyote wailed, a dog howled, and the chittering of cicadas or electricity filled the emptiness.