is /lit/ a place i can submit my writing to be roasted? I just wrote a short story and it's still taking shape but i need some one to read it.
Yes, ignore the posts that say it is shit without explaning. Someone is likely to read it, I may read it when I wake up, going to sleep in a minute.
>>7697607
alright. keep in mind this was recently shat out. i just want a dicsussion about it.
Right now I’m sitting in a chair in front of a pool. The water is still and unbroken, the porous stone surrounding the pool is dry and warm. I put my feet on the stone and feel my soles warm. Bees circle the flowers in my mother’s garden. Everything is vibrant and alive, and the sun’s harsh rays burn the image into the back of my eyes. I won’t remember most of what I’m seeing tomorrow. I won’t remember this pool in its entirety tomorrow. I get hung up on this idea, how little I notice my surroundings. It’s hard to explain, I tried once to tell my mother about this fear I have, that everything is moving too quickly to preserve it, that most of what we experience is gone and forgotten forever in an instant, that so many things have come and gone, that I’ll never be able to experience more than a small fraction of what has been or will be.
She didn’t understand what I was trying to express. She said to me “beauty is always fleeting”. Why do people speak only in platitudes, it makes me sick. “Beauty is fleeting.” How useless. Everything is fleeting. That’s beside the point anyway. What I was trying to tell her was so much more than that. I guess what I was trying to say is that the world overwhelms me. I wish I could experience everything. I wish I could remember everything I experience. It makes me sad that I can’t.
When I learned my father had died I noticed my surroundings truly for the first time. Seemingly inconsequential things from that moment stay with me. I remember when my principal took me in the hallway. I remember the bright floral pattern on her blouse. I remember every spot where the paint chipped on the wall. She stood there, in her blouse, with her gold earrings, and her perfectly styled hair, and she cried. Why was she crying? It wasn’t her father. She didn’t even know the man. Why wasn’t I crying? This was the man who raised me, who had been with me as long as I remembered. What was wrong with me?
>>7697628
I think I didn’t cry because I felt like an outside observer. I seemed to be detached from all emotion at the moment. I think what I felt most of all, if anything, was surprise. I had always known he was going to die at some point in my life. I had realized this would happen eventually, but I found myself surprised by just how it happened.
For one thing, I didn’t foresee the hallway. No particular place had come to mind, this wasn’t a situation I had planned out or anything, but even so, I didn’t think it would take place in this hallway. This was a place I had laughed with my friends. I had walked through here every day, and it had always been just another place. How did I not know that this would be the place I learned my father had died? How did I not feel that energy every day when I walked through there? On that day it burst from the walls, and burned its mark firmly into my memory. Everything was tainted by the words coming out of my principal’s mouth. The lockers weren’t lockers anymore, they were lockers I had learned of my father’s death next to. The tile on the floor wasn’t any tile, it was the tile on which I stood when my life crashed around me. Every inanimate object seemed tainted by grief, never to return to its unsullied state again.
I didn’t foresee the principal. The day I met her, she was introducing herself to our freshman class. I was another face in the auditorium, not listening to her. Now I wonder how I didn’t realize that the voice booming over the PA system every morning was the same voice I would hear saying the words “I’m sorry, your father hurt himself and he- I’m so sorry.”
I knew my father would die, I just didn’t know it would come from Principal Clark, in the 100 wing. I didn’t know that day in February, which I passed every year without notice, would become the day my father ceased to be. It paralyses me now, because I try to notice everything I can. I meticulously and deliberately take note of the chair I’m in right now. Will this be the chair I’m sitting in when I learn of my mother dying? The shirt I’m wearing right now, will it be the shirt I’m wearing when my future wife and I meet? Will it be the shirt I’m wearing when she dies, or leaves me? This day in the middle of June, will it be the day I die in? It scares me on a deep level that I will never know. It scares me that all the inanimate objects before me could be wolves in sheep’s clothing, hiding immense grief. It scares me that someday, right before I get snuffed out like a candle in the wind, I’ll only be surprised.
>>7697628
>It wasn't her father. She didn't even know the man.
Surely you mean "my father"?
I like it, OP. Are you Portuguese by any chance? This reminds me of some of Fernando Pessoa's work.
I really enjoyed that, but yeah, has to go somewhere else from here.
Still, good job, man.
