Patchwork People XXIX When cows fly
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Patchwork People XIX: First Draft People free porn video
XIX. First draft people.
An occasional bat flickered across the stars overhead. The gardenias and
hibiscus had long drawn in their petal- awnings. Across the lawn, the
hunched bushes looked like a queue of black-robed monks marching back to
their monastery. And in the middle distance, fireflies marked a
secondary night-sky of transitory constellations in what might have been
an even more unpredictable universe than the one we find ourselves
inhabiting, one that blinks in an out of existence with every passing
second.
It was after midnight.
An hour earlier, Marcia, wearing a denim jacket against the late summer
chill, had decided on a walk. As she passed the main house, she found
Grace, bundled in a quilt, sitting on the porch. Now they sat together,
sipping tea, a plate of untouched almond-butter cookies on the wicker
table. The sound of crickets filled the companionable silence that had
stretched between them.
Grace had listened patiently, without interruption, to Marcia's
retelling of her argument with Phoebe. Could you even properly call it
an argument? In her retelling, Marcia tried to be fair to both of them,
to get at the truth of the situation, to see it from all possible sides.
In the end, she'd fallen silent with frustration. It seemed hopeless.
She could make no sense of it all.
Marcia was reminded of a particularly difficult stretch towards the end
of her marriage with Claire. Everything they said to each other seemed
to spark a violent altercation. Even things said just in an attempt to
make conversation, things that had nothing to do with their doomed
relationship. Politics, the quality of the orange juice, events from the
night before, the weather...they could agree on nothing. It was as if
they were living in two entirely different, if tantalizingly parallel,
worlds.
As an experiment, Marcia vowed to herself that she wouldn't speak at all
except about those handful of things of which she were absolutely
certain. The problem, she'd found out soon enough, was that the things
she actually knew for certain didn't even amount to a handful. It hardly
seemed possible for her to open her mouth without giving voice to
statements whose veracity rested on nothing but opinion. Back in school,
writing term papers, one was required to cite sources to back-up the
veracity of one's statements. Not a bad practice. But Marcia could cite
authority for little to nothing of what she said or thought.
How much less accurate were her interpretations when it came to
understanding the motivations of other people? How could she possibly
understand what Claire had felt back then? Or what Phoebe felt now? All
too often, Marcia didn't know what she really felt until long after the
fact. Witness, for instance, how long it took her to discover that she
was a woman.
Sometimes Marcia thought her life would have turned out far better if
she could have gone through it perfectly mute. She might not have
understood herself or others better but at least by remaining silent she
wouldn't have been adding to the cacophony and confusion. Often she
fantasized about moving to a new place and pretending to be mute. She
hated her voice at the time anyway, feared it would give her away. When
she arrived in Hope Crossing she half-seriously entertained the idea of
letting it be known that she was mute, but it proved to be just too
impractical. Nonetheless, she talked as little as necessary, just enough
to get by. It was the beginning of a period of withdrawal from any but
the most superficial social connection with the world.
With the entrance of Grace and Walt into her life, that period of her
life ended. Marcia felt a connection she had never had felt before. It
never ceased to surprised her how Walt could often finish her sentences;
how she could often finish his. How they could be driving through a
crowded city or going seventy along the interstate and they'd noticed
the same detail in the scenery blurring passed...a parked car in a
restaurant parking lot, a particular cloud-formation floating across the
horizon, the slogan on a billboard of no special significance. It
happened so often that it seemed it had to be more than just mere
coincidence. She came to think of it as the opposite of the frustrating
sensation she'd experienced with Claire of living in parallel worlds.
Perhaps what love really was, in the end, were two people sharing,
through their perceptions of it, the same world.
Now, with Phoebe, Marcia found her old uncertainty and despair had
returned. She suspected that she and Phoebe lived in separate worlds, a
world from which Marcia was exiled, just as she'd been exiled from
Claire's. Even communication between their worlds was hopelessly
scrambled. Marcia thought she must have some kind of faulty antennae.
The signals she received and the ones she sent were all wrong somehow.
She just wasn't getting accurate information. How could she communicate
under the circumstances when everything she said seemed to be
misinterpreted in the worst possible way?
"Penny for your thoughts," Grace said.
"Trust me, you won't get your money's worth."
"Consider me warned. I'll take the gamble."
Marcia sighed. She suddenly felt how cold the unsipped cup of tea was in
her hand. She put it down carefully on the table.
"I just wish...oh, I don't know what I wish. That I could have been a
better person, I guess, a different person, the person I saw myself as
being in my mind's eye. I understand that no one's perfect, but I've
failed so badly, fallen so far short. I'm not sure of anything anymore."
She stopped, catching herself before going too far, passed the point of
no return. Then, in spite of herself, she decided to press on, to have
it all out once and for all. "I look at the mess I've made of things, of
my life in general, and I look at the task ahead, what's necessary to
straighten it all out and the limited time left to do it, and I just
want to give up. I want to surrender. And, the worst part is, somehow I
can't."
Grace was quiet for some moments, letting the crickets have their say,
waiting for the break that signaled her own part in the night symphony.
It came, eventually.
"Well, I'm glad you can't give up. It means you're still alive."
Marcia laughed softly. "Oh I'm alive alright. If being alive means the
ability to keep making one mistake after another."
"It's an accomplishment not to be passed over lightly. Being alive. So
many people aren't really, you know. They fake it without even knowing
they're faking it. They're practically zombies. It's easier that way,
but not a very meaningful way to exist. I know you're not what you
pictured yourself to be. No one is. No one is as successful, as
beautiful, as young, tall, rich, blonde, whatever, as they want to be.
But however it was that you figure you ended up here, on in this porch
in Hope Crossing in the state you're in, whether you believe God made
you what you are, or your parents, or Nature, or your genes or just
plain dumb bad luck, remember this: you aren't finished yet. There's
still work to do. That's your job to do in this lifetime. To finish
yourself."
Grace paused a moment, gathering her thoughts, then continued.
"We're all just first-draft people here. All you have to do is take a
look around at the state of the world to see that. This whole world is
an unfinished draft of what it should be, of what it still might be one
day. The difference is that some people stay first-draft people from the
cradle to the grave. They never revise themselves. They're as rough and
unfinished at the end as they were at the beginning of their life-story.
What a waste of a life. The way I see it, the point isn't to become
perfect. But to make of yourself as complex and complete and interesting
a character as you can possibly be.
"Now, me, I personally believe that God made us, each and every one of
us, but She made us rough and incomplete. Maybe there wasn't time to
finish us. Maybe She wanted to give us something to do during our time
here. Let us take a part in Creation. Keep us invested and interested in
the project. Make life worth living. Who knows? In any event, She added
a little something of her intelligence to each of us that would enable
us to take things up from where she left off. Otherwise, in a perfect
world, why bother? The way things are, why, there's always a little more
to do. A little dab here and there. You fill in one part, scratch out
another. Endless corrections, improvements, false starts,
improvisations. It's all okay. She's only going to be pissed if you
don't take up the job at all. Fact is, if you're doing it right, you're
never really finished with the job of creating and recreating yourself.
That's what makes a beautiful life.
"One day death comes around one day and takes the job away from you,
finished or not, but that's as it has to be, because it's never going to
be perfect, not even if you had all of eternity. Only God could have
made it perfect and She chose not to. I guess what I'm saying is that
you're a work-in-progress. We all are. So don't be so hard on yourself.
Don't be hard on Phoebe. Don't even be hard on Claire, hard as that may
be. You are doing what you are here to do. Your best. You might not see
the progress but I do. Walt does. I'll bet even Phoebe does, or will,
one day. You're well into your second-draft by now and working all the
time. That's the important thing."
Grace fell silent after that.
Marcia knew that there was wisdom and compassion and hope in what Grace
had said. But there were times, and this was one of them, that the work
of revision and correction seemed hopeless. Her life looked to her like
a page blackened by erasures and cross-outs, nearly worn through in
places. It had been a bad idea from the start, a lost, wasted effort
beyond redemption. She thought of the scars on the insides of her wrists
but knew she couldn't go that way again. She wished she could just
crumple her life up and toss it in the wastebasket and start all over
again. But that wasn't an option either. All she could do was what Grace
had suggested. Pick up from where she'd left off. Try to make something
passably beautiful out of the mess she'd already made.
* * * * *
Author note: I plan to publish "Patchwork People" in its entirety in
weekly installments here on Fictionmania. In the meantime, the complete
novel is currently available as an Amazon Kindle ebook for $2.99.
For more of my writings, drawings, erotica, and photos please visit my
blog Bad Pussy
sissyforlife(dot)blogspot(dot)com.
Clover
- 27.04.2020
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