Overheard

Overheard

I.

"Anything at all," she said, and I wondered how much
better it would be if it turned out I wouldn't have to ask.

II.

Compared to the way it was, say twenty years ago, I
doubt if what we were able to add balances out what we lost.

III.

Every day I don't see him makes it easier for me to
forget why I chose to leave in the first place.

IV.

Give me one good reason why I shouldn't just
head out on my own. Do you even care?

V.

If you really cared about me, you wouldn't be
joking about this. All you think about is yourself.

VI.

Keep a candle burning. I'm sorry that I have to
leave, but I'll be back soon. I promise.

VII.

Maybe the best thing would be to just pretend that
nothing ever happened in the first place.

VIII.

One foot in front of the other. Just keep going.
Put some distance between yourself and all of this.

IX.

Quite a show you put on last night. Do you even
remember what you did? Do you feel proud of yourself?

X.

Suppose you could choose to erase your life and
take another shot from the start. Would you do it?

XI.

Up until today, I thought everything was going
Very well. What happened? What went wrong?

XII.

Figure it out. Turn in over in your mind. Solve for
X. Take responsibility for yourself, for God's sake.

XII.

Yesterday feels awfully far way right now. I have
zero confidence that tomorrow will be much better.


Process Reflection: One of my students tried doing something like this for an assignment this week, stringing a series of short stanzas across an alphabetical and numerical grid. Looked like it might be fun on Friday night. This is a very wet first draft. But pretty early on I got interested in the idea of snippets from dialogues or interior monologues. The alphabet headers just gave each line a little bit of a push. Needs a lot more work, maybe either by pulling the threads together or by pushing them further apart. But it's something that didn't exist forty minutes ago that does now. Strange magic.