five for the new year

I.

II.

My therapist tells me to be more delusional. “I have all sorts of people come in here,” he says. “Gold-medal olympians, a woman writing a book, someone who just ran a marathon. Your writing is good, I think you could go further than you think.”

I don’t know if I agree with him. I don’t know if I have a style. I set about being delusional regardless. I’ve started reading more: a short story a day. I read Ling Ma and Lauren Groff. I read authors I’ve never heard of, novels by others that I have. During the reading I am paying extra attention to what works and what doesn’t. I’m allowing myself to be captivated but also studied. I underline sentences and passages, I gasp at narrative constructions and nod my head when I understand the delicate work they are doing as they weave past and present together.

I read stories about peking duck and plaster casts; prophecies and silent reflections on the lives we live and don’t. I keep thinking about the stories I want to write and why I want to write them. There’s something delusional there: to keep writing things just to figure them out.

III.

At night I dream, and in these dreams I am always on a journey. Sometimes it’s a business trip or searching for a museum. People pop in and out of my dreams, some I talk to all the time and others I haven’t spoken to in years. An ex’s mom, a working woman, an old friend who asks me to watch their old dog. I am constantly looking for something I cannot find and like Virgil guiding Dante through each successive level of hell, these strange figures are here to help me make the trek.

I rarely think of dreams as prophecy. I doubt the subconscious has much to say that the conscious mind isn’t already thinking of. In my dreams I am often aware that I am dreaming. I bite my lip or I just shake my head and reason with myself. “I know I am im a dream,” I say. “There’s no point looking for my high school schedule because I am not in high school anymore.”

Still, I keep dreaming.

IV.

I am writing a story about two teenagers in love. It’s set against the backdrop of a disastrous fire that burns out of control for days, threatening to destroy the city they live in. In this story the fires are routine at first. Faced with global climate change, the characters live in a world of constant summer wildfires and are unfazed by the walls of flame that encircle them.

In my story the two teenagers are very close to graduation. They are thinking about where they go from here and what their lives will look like once they do. At least one of them is gay and constantly fawning over his best friend who, while probably not gay, still finds some comfort in the intense closeness the two of them share. In this short story the sky is a perpetual orange and no adults are ever around. The two teens live in their own world; the main narrator obsessively spending all of his time around his more attractive and athletic friend. He compares his current life to the life of his friend, trying to understand how, or why, his friend keeps him around.

His friend has great ambitions. He wants to move away to Seattle or to the east coast to study film or architecture or computer science. His friend is athletic but not dumb, tall but not a jock, certain and not anxious. He is a man defined by action while the main narrator is a man defined by constant juxtaposition and equivocation.

V.

I want to accomplish a lot this year, even if change is scary. I want to read more and write more. I want to submit to literary magazines and finish a short story. I want to host more get togethers, inviting my friends over for drinks or dinners or board game nights, etc. I want to start working out again. I want to clean more and be someone who doesn’t let dishes pile up. I want, most of all, to articulate my desires, not to preface each one with a qualifying “well on the other hand.” I want to be certain about the things I want and need to live a life worth living. I want to be kind-hearted and full of love. I want someone to tell me how much they enjoy my presence in their life.