Iced Out (100x7)

I don’t know if this is the time to bring this up, or when that time would be, but it’s been two years now with not one word from you. I’ve tried to do what you asked, to let you go and get on with my life. But I still don’t know what I did wrong, why it had to be this way, why you chose to ice me out in the first place and why you have kept it up this long. I guess this is how it has to be, but God help me, I still love you.

Process Reflection: One hundred one-syllable words for an archetypal human situation.

I was watching “Friday Night Lights” the other night and there’s a scene where one of the characters who has been hurting for some time over a breakup confronts his ex-girlfriend and says “Just look me in the eye and tell me you don’t feel the same way I feel about you and move on.” So she looks him in the eye and says. “I don’t felt the same way about you that you feel about me. You need to move on,” and then turns on her heel and leaves him standing there.

Then the other day I was talking with a friend who is still hurting after a breakup that he stills sees as inexplicable, and that got me thinking about the various times in my life, from grade seven on up, when I was in situations close enough to this one to be able to relate.

When I used to teach elementary school one of the things I once heard one of my mentors say was that if kids know they are going to write every day, they start to pay a different kind of attention to what is going on in their lives. And I know that’s true: now that I’m a week into this 100-word exercise, I’m starting to line up ideas ahead of time. I was thinking as I went to sleep last night about what I might wind up writing about today, and I had thought about maybe working with a one-syllable limitation.



When I woke up near midnight, I started pushing one syllable words down the road of my mind and found myself muttering “I don’t know if this is the time…” Not wanting to forget that beginning, I got out of bed, went to the kitchen, opened my notebook, and next thing you know I was channeling these words out of that tv drama and that real-life conversation.