The story right now

I usually only write when I have or after having had an epiphany that brings the story I’m attempting to create to the fore-front of my conscious thought. Yesterday was one of those times.

I was napping, I rarely do that, and I woke up inside a dream that would become the epiphany I needed to write. I saw the book unfold inside my pre-frontal cortex and stuck to my amigdala and long term memories. Of course I began writing immidiately as I awoke, dreams are ephemeral; I refuse to lose the magic of an epiphany to laziness, that would be a waste of unrefined creativity.

(These are the notes I wrote yesterday in my attempt to capture my dream and distill it into an inky portrayal featuring words and not images swirling in my mind) -

Book = No title (yet… maybe I’ll call it Epiphanies or something like that, or I might name the protagonist that, no idea)

First Half:

The book opens as the protagonist, a hikkikomori having just made it to his 6th month of seclusion (not said outright, but hinted to) is relating the story of how is his now passed-away ex-girlfriend pushed him out of the way of a falling boulder on their trip to the Andes Mountains as a graduation present for highschool; he explains that her hand was crushed and she fell, and though her harness caught her, the rock crushed her, killing her almost instantly, but making her delicate body punctured and flattened and flooded with blood and bile. He then relates vignette’s of their time together. He altogether makes it clear that while, in reality the relationship was your average highschool-just-graduated-got-together-at-the-end-of-senior-year-because-they-finally-had-no-reason-not-to that was bound to fail once they went their separate collegiate ways, the protagonist madonna-fies the girl; he attempts to apotheosize her, dreaming of her every night, relating everything about her character through stories that flood into his mind about their 3 years together which are brought up in a conversation between him and his psychiatrist which his concerned parents paid to heal their hiki-life-living son.

The psychiatrist says little, constantly writing down almost all of what the protagonist says, and only doesn’t write down the extra-fluff-bullshit that the protagonist is saying to enshrine his budding and unrequited love for the girl. Throughout the process, the protagonist plays music like Run Around by Blues Traveler and other ’90′s hits when the psychiatrist offers any kind of advice on how to get over his ex-but-still-loved-girlfriend. The protagonist continues to live a life with no present, past, or future; he wishes his gf wasn’t dead in the present, hadn’t died in the past, and through a process of shit philosophy and convoluted logic expressed with the utmost certainty explains she would have married him the future despite having been with him for 3 years and still going across the world (she makes it clear she will most likely leave him during college, but the protagonist pushes this thought out of his head after the accident) for college. The psychiatrist grows a bit cynical through each vignette of their relationship: First he recounts how they met when they were 12; how she bullied him until he cried and told his mom he hated her when they were 14; how they sat in the dragonfly fields when they were 15 behind the brush while the lightning bugs and dragonflies protected them as they had their first kisses; how when they were 16 they lost their virginity together by the sea when the jellyfish began lighting up the sea; how when they were still 16 his parents kicked him out of his house for a month for him having lost his virginity before marriage, and how he had to stay with his beloved’s family, unbeknownst to her parents, in her room for the time; how when he was 17 she had told him she loved him less than before, but that was only because college was coming up and she didn’t know what to do, and how they cried and mourned their fate together; how when they were, only a week later than the previous event, about to break up when she attempted to punch him for taking her heart, and he held her hand and walked away; how they didn’t talk for a month after that; how when he turned 18 (the month after) all of that had passed and they began to talk again, apologized, and began to love again; how she died only 2 months after that, on her own 18th birthday and how tragic the event was (I’ll add some more stuff to this).

The protagonist begins to experience serious religious discontent, describing this time to the psychiatrist. First converting from his atheistic worship of science to Christianity (no particular sect, he doesn’t think that far ahead) to ensure his love will be saved; after all, how could she not in his eyes? He then converts to Hinduism for the ideas of Samsara, so he can be reborn with his love once more in another generation to come, no matter how long he’d have to wait. Then he converted to Buddhism, and finally he explains he did all of this with wikipedia information and describes how he came to hate all of the religions and stopped right before he attempted to convert to Judaism, only stopped by his crippling Hikkikomori issues; he leaves the house but tears a Torah in half when he enters the synagogue due to a line in the Torah which Moshe says to the Jews to “Choose Life” while screaming at the reform Rabbi that his girlfriend couldn’t have chosen life before being thrown out by the security officer. The Psychiatrist is still silent up to this point.

The Psychiatrist finally speaks in a quiet, rather slow monotone at the end of this 5 hour lecture he has been given by a man 1/3 of his age, a man not yet a true man. The Psychiatrist tells the protagonist that this incident isn’t the worst he’ll face in his life; if it is, the Psychiatrist makes it clear that the death of a loved one such as this will eventually be something at least time can heal. He goes on to tell the protagonist that his survivor’s guilt is understandable and that as a psychiatrist, he can prescribe medicines to ease his guilt biologically, but none of his medicines will mend the protagonists beaten up self-esteem, his own self-destructive path to no future, nor his inability to accept the already dead and gone past. With that, the Psychiatrist leaves the room and tells the kid to change college choices, to no longer attend X college, but to attend a small school in the South of the U.S. where smart, completely lost students flock; the protagonist tells the Psychiatrist he’ll think about it and that his choice to attend UCB was one made by his parents, and that in the protagonist’s opinion, he doesn’t deserve the spot at the school, despite receiving a 2320 on his SAT (80 points off what his mother expected). The last scene of the first half of the book is the protagonist walking onto campus and successfully talking to his RA without going into a rage, finally conquering his Hikkikomori and working on accepting his girlfriend’s death. He sees a field abuzz with Dragonflies and closes his eyes in his bed.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Second Half of the Book

The protagonist is now 10 years older. Having converted back to his atheistic tendencies and, having recovered from his previous now-decade-old love trauma enough to understand his previous relationship wasn’t perfect, nor was it going to end in marriage most likely, has begun dating a girl neither he, his parents, nor his long-dead ex-gf could have seen him date before he graduated from college. While he still views his highschool relationship with a certain rosey tint, his yearning has all but gone, and his life has only gone up since that time – though honestly that was the only place it could have gone so long as he didn’t jump down from a high place with no comically placed tapestry for him to bounce off. He has gone from a basement dwelling Hikkikomori to a self-assured man dating a self-proclaimed “bad bitch.” An altricial youth now dating a precocious, formerly precocial street girl, who just turned 25. Though his family knows his old girlfriend would hate his now girlfriend, one who dresses more than a bit slutty, talks more than a bit dirty in front of others, and enjoys having what people would describe as somewhere between innocent-hand-holding PDA and intercourse in public just enough to have 4 citations for lewd behavior with 4 different guys; the fourth is our protagonist of course.

This scene continues and the reader realizes that the protagonist is explaining all of this while he is moving all of his new girlfriend’s items into his apartment. While doing so, he moves her indie music, her overly-risqué club dresses, her commando boots and some ombre-hair dye while she is re-arranging his things in his room. The protagonist leaves the house to pick up some various items, milk, the like, etc. He questions whether or not he wants to buy new condoms since his other ones are slightly old, but decides not to since his girlfriend is on birth control. In the store he meets an old college friend of his who he boasts to that his girlfriend is a model and a “10″ on the “dicked’er scale.” The friend tells him that he is absolutely lucky to have a girl like that, and asks to see a picture of her; the protagonist obliges and while he does so, he tells the friend about some dickhead model manager who told his gf that, according to how his gf put it, “she was at best a 7.5 and that she was a model wannabe and to take her attitude somewhere that guys could penetrate it if she wanted some money because she wasn’t gonna make the cut with her looks or with her mouth. Oh and she had, has, and will always have self-esteem problems that he’d let the toolshed that is her boyfriend, whoever she reels in month to month for her bills before she drops him, to deal with.” The friend awkwardly laughs, tells the protagonist that he’s happy for the protagonist and that love is a great thing; the friend leaves the store giving the reader the feeling that the protagonist’s image of his gf is just as warped as was the previous girlfriend’s image in his mind, though this time the inverse has happened.

The protagonist, having gotten his errands done, returns to his room to see that his girlfriend is lying on his bed almost totally naked with her butt facing the ceiling and her face in her iphone. She asks him if he’s waiting for an invitation or if she needs to unzip his pants for him and maybe chew his food for him while she’s at it. The protagonist wastes no time fondling her and getting to work. She tells him to put a condom on, he doesn’t question it and puts one of his 4 month old condoms on hastily and slightly skewed. His girlfriend tells him to go harder and faster and to not stop; of course, not wanting to fail his girlfriend, he does so. The condom breaks but the decibels of the condom breaking can’t compare to the smacking of bodies, so the two remain ecstatically ignorant. Finally the protagonist pulls out after having spilled his seed and finds the condom broken. The girlfriend is horrified but the protagonist finds this no different from her usual dramatics; this is true until about 4 seconds after hyperventilating, the girlfriend explains that she was on her 1 week out of the month period and that she hadn’t taken the pill in 3 days and that she couldn’t take the day after pill either.

This sends the protagonist into a care-taking poker face. He instantly tells his girlfriend that nothing will happen, and that she is perfect, and whatever she needs to hear until she calms down. Standard procedure for him. She tells him that she doesn’t want a baby now, and that she had already been denied from the job she was applying for because she re-blogged a few more-like-naked-internet-pics-than-actual-modeling photos she took in the bathroom that a modeling company said they didn’t want because they wouldn’t “fit their standard of high-profile nude modeling” but still got about 1k reblogs from random creeps on tumblr. He continues to console her even when the phrase and consequences of, “No pill. Semen spill. Baby bill.” goes through his mind more than a couple times.

The protagonist becomes plagues with guilt, thinking how his parents, grandparents (alive and dead), and his long-dead ex-gf would think of his situation; he tells himself what they would say at 4 am while he can’t sleep, repeating, “you got that hoe pregnant? She’s just a 2 cent stripper whore! She can’t pay the bills, she can’t even wear clothes even remotely close to a wedding dress without her $8k boobs falling out and tweeting it while she walks down the aisle!” even though her boobs aren’t actually fake to his knowledge and she hasn’t ever actually been a stripper to his knowledge though she doesn’t tell him much about her past, to his knowledge. To his knowledge she isn’t Zehia Dehar though. The protagonist begins to re-experience his survivor’s guilt, the Hiki-life, and puts up an ever-increasingly-shitty poker face of care-taking happiness for his now preggers girlfriend. Their relationship begins to suffer more than it had even during the bad down times. He begins to describe the bad downtimes: when he was unable to produce in bed because of his past trauma; when her family came and insulted her and he found out why she dresses so confidently and acts so tough while having low self-esteem; when his family came by and disapproved so strongly that they left that same day, causing her to put up such a strong front that it was only broken when the protagonist told her that he was going to cry and she began to uncontrollably sob on his shoulder about how she was a bad person.

The protagonist emerges from this stream of consciousness to realize that he has to marry this girl and that she is the one for him; the girlfriend, though a college dropout due to lack of funds because her father feels she is a failure for not finding a husband in the first 3 years of college, forcing her to enter a job as a nightclub dancer and drop her major in a child psychology, though she never publicly admits this, is not stupid enough to believe this. She accepts the proposal though, understanding that the protagonist means well, has a bright future as a businessman and treats her the best of any boyfriend, despite her fairly furtive attempts at hiding her life from him. Their relationship now recovers a bit.

Soon his fianceé begins to show. She begins to see she can’t wear her normal clothing with no midrift and cut-out breast ovals because not only does the clothing not fit her swelled and painful breasts, but the belly with a child is not as flattering in that look as a flat belly. She begins to become distressed, and despite the protagonist’s attempts at consoling her, she realizes her life as a hot-chica with “dat ass” is most likely now resigned to hopefully, possibly being an attractive mother of one; she realizes, due to the classes she took before in psychology, she realizes she can’t wear that clothing in front of her son or daughter because of the conditioning effect it will have, in her opinion at least. They have a fight in Chik-Fil-A during lunch rush where she gets into a fight over his façade and care-taking poker face, despite her obvious, ubiquitous façade life-style and when he responds that none of what happened was part of the plan, she storms off, out of the store. His bride-to-be being consumed with her grief, self-loathing, and lack of attention to pay anywhere else but herself, walks into a street intersection that is an inlet for cars full of hungry Chik-Fil-A clientele being waved on by an employee directing traffic; as the employee waves on a rather large truck, the bride-to-be runs eyes closed, tears flowing into the street. The protagonist sees this and pushes her out of the way, and in the process is hit by a truck going about 30-40 mph into the inlet; typical southern driving at it’s finest I’d say. The bride-to-be begins to sob even harder and a truck driving, CFA meal #1 eating man steps out of the vehicle and grabs ahold of the protagonist, and has the bride-to-be call 911 while attempting to drag her mind back to reality. The ambulance pulls up and the bride-to-be is sobbing at her husband-to-be’s seeming ultimate sacrfice for her lack of faith in him as a lover and partner.

Having just done what had been done for him a decade ago, the protagonist enters a long, drawn out dream as he is rushed to the hospital. The lights, sounds, and smells of the ambulance affect these dreams, but the protagonist doesn’t notice this. The protagonist enters a room that is moving on all sides in all directions equally, thus not moving at all, and notices that he has just entered an eternal still, having just given what he believes is the ultimate sacrifice for an entirely different girl, one who he hasn’t had the chance to even propose to. The protagonist is then shown a bright light, he touches the light and it sears his eyes to the point he can no longer see. All goes dark. He then sees himself walk into a field teeming with dragonflies flying about, sun low in the sky; his dead ex-gf from long ago is sitting in the field, wearing a skirt of flower petals and a bra of leaves, the dragon-flies (as in, like, midget dragons in the form of dragonflies) come and go around her splendor.

The protagonist has his dead ex begin to discuss the lot of life: love, life, loss, and how awful the protagonist was at sex. Throughout the conversation, the forest around them and the grass under them begin to light up various neon colors and begin to smell of metal and cotton. The dead ex never asks the protagonist questions, it’s a one way conversation, because she tells the protagonist she has no need to. The conversation heats up when the protagonist asks if his ex ever thought she truly was the one for him and he touches her face in the process, turning her face to crumbling sandstone; her face them turns to sand and crumbles away into the wind. The protagonist moves back and asks if she can still talk to him. He receives no response. He goes into a flurry of emotions that turn the grass under him into a filigree ornate with neon hues. The entire dreams spectrum begins to become cloudy and the dragonflies begin to blend into the air and the grass into the trees. The protagonist asks if his ex approves of his life, of his girlfriend, if she isn’t angry at him for knocking his new love up and she gives no response; the protagonist rushes at her to hug her, but her standing body turns to salt and the dragon-flies carry each salt chrystal away.

As this is happening, while the protagonist is being rushed away in an ambulance while in critical condition, the bride-to-be spends her time crying on the sidewalk; she still looks wholly ridiculous because her baby belly doesn’t come close to matching her self-proclaimed clothes-that-only-confident-girls-can-pull-off look. As she is crying there, the truck driver offers to take her to the hospital, she agrees and tells the truck driver it’s all her fault. The truck driver doesn’t disagree, agree, or say anything about the matter until she begins sobbing with such power that she begins to rock the truck; at this point the truck driver tells her that he is a simple man, he’s just southern guy with a southern drawl with a love of southern fried chicken sandwiches and that in his mind, the best thing she can do is be with her husband-to-be, that and stop sobbing hard enough to rock a 2 ton truck.

After being driven to the hospital, the bride-to-be sees her husban ICU. She looks at him as he lies totally still with several IV’s and intubation helping him survive the events of the day. The ambulance EMT that worked on the protagonist approaches the bride-to-be and tells her that they did all they can do, and that the doctors are picking up the job from there. The bride-to-be asks her if her husband will make it. The EMT responds that it’s highly likely he will, but that for now the patient is in critical condition, but to remain hopeful and positive. The bride-to-be breaks down crying, tears streaming down the walls of the hospital and vision blurred, she looks at her critical condition hubby.

This leads into the final scene. We return to our protagonist entering a room with his eyes closed. This room is dark except for the moment when when a voice calls out “ויהי אור” and a medium sized bright sphere appears in front of him. He asks the sphere if god has forgotten about him and the woman he loves, and the situation that is dire, telling god he searched about his youth for him but never found him, so there’s really no way to forget if he doesn’t even exist. A voice calls out to him, from the midst of the orb, “הוא לא שכח”. The protagonist asks what that means and no voice calls out, he opens his eyes to find there is no orb, only total darkness and no sound. The protagonist believes he is blind, until he sees etchings in his right hand that says “צָפְנַת פַּעְנֵחַ‎” at which point he sees his other “לקבל את הגאולה” and the book ends.