silent writing club #1
I went with my friend to go to a writing club yesterday, hosted at a bar during the first two hours of their opening to facilitate happy hour drinks. I have never attended anything of this nature in my life, but found the space welcoming and unpretentious. It started off with someone reading a short story, followed by 30 minutes of silent writing time based on a prompt related to the story. Afterwards, people asked me if I liked anything I wrote, to which I simply mentioned, "I'm just proud that I wrote anything at all, you know?"
Below is what I managed to create in the 30-minute period, with some minor edits that I made while transcribing the handwritten papers to the screen. I think it'll be great for me to post these exercises here and see how it transforms over time.
Prompt: Write about a happy time in your life; it can be a narrative or series of vignettes, for example.
(untitled), 09 January 2024
What I remember the most is the pull of the water, a call, it wanted to show me something. As we rounded the corner, a sign told us to honk to announce our presence (honk? in this paradise? when reflectors would have done the job of making us known?) as we pulled into the parking spot on Lovers Lane. But the cheesy name of the road to this lakeside cabin couldn't tear me away from the lake (it was a lake! unbelievable, glittering, glistening, jeweled reflections). From where we stood, the red lighthouse came up as a tiny needle, barely perceptible against the reflection of the water.
On the first day there I rolled out at breakfast, on and out past the covered patio to the second patio, outdoors, an unobstructed view of the water below, framed by what I could only guess was a kid's summer shop -- I mean by that, a provider of plastic trinkets for the sand, to erect replicas of castles for lives we've never known. I couldn't imagine it housing more, it was barely the size of a tollbooth.
Beyond that, the water works in waves. You know, first you have to gaze longingly from afar, to watch and not touch the water curl and foam at the shore, to wonder about the gradient of blues and greens and yellows. It commanded study, so much so that I spent the good part of that morning dreaming of crescents, crescents formed in the sky by hang gliders bending the wind to move through the waters. It was the same crescent we saw the night before, and I could only think: the eclipse is coming after me.
Night fell and the wooden cabin's air fell dry. My phone told us that the moon was setting but I didn't know what that meant. Then I remembered the New Jersey boardwalk after coming out of Asbury Park's queer club and crawling up the boardwalk, and how I've never been to Martha's Vineyard, or whatever it is, those pristine summer vacations, but to me, it felt all the same. The moon was orange that summer night and the clouds in the night sky shrouded the moon in mysterious silhouettes. But the moon moves, and we had a few minutes to head down to the shore of the lake, looping around the Adirondack chairs that watched over the restaurant's parking lot and down past the midcentury marvel with the bubbled windows reminiscent of a submarine or fast food play ground, and it was her, the Jersey summer moon, here in this Michigan autumn, and if I allowed myself to empty my head of the pesky thoughts that dictated my outer being, I could watch it float down the horizon.
I didn't know the moon set over the waters of Grand Haven, or that when it disappeared underwater, leaving us enclosed in darkness, I didn't know that it had taken me down with it, to be immersed in that quiet beauty, only to disappear from the grasp of my eyes and away from my mind. I don't know if it'll come back again, if I can keep searching, to remember, to find, not to fear or to forget.