For Extension English, we had to write a story as an appropriation of
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. I'm just posting to see what you think, before I hand it in. It's not very much, a 2-night effort, and a kind of stretch in regards to appropriation, but help, please! Thanks heaps. (Also... very long.)
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Vivir con miedo, es como vivir a medias
It begins in a room, where there’s too much implied in all the corners that it’s said we die from just the thoughts, and their complexity, and their recurrence. It is dark, both the room and the story, and it is one that you never want to enter. Why?
You don’t return, neither in entirety nor in parts. There is only a fragmented shell to hold though if you do. And even that will crumble in your grasp.
And when it does, it echoes off, to the sounds of insanity. “I wish… I wish… I wish…”
--
It’s a hot night, and when I come home, I leave the windows, doors, curtains, open. I am single-minded.
I sit down to the computer I left on this morning, before normalcy summoned me, and in the dwindling sunlight, I make another page to my story.
It neither has fully started or ended yet. But that is my goal – to start, from the middle, and emerge with a fully told tale, one to rival the greatness of Shakespeare. Keats. Shelley.
The pages take my mind into an abyss, where the rhythmically clacking keys accompany me, duetting with whatever song is playing.
… and I’m drowning slowly, off the coast, and I’m headed nowhere…
I resolve, detachedly, to change those songs. To make them applicable for me, to help me to write, to help my goal, to be remembered and glorified forever only as the greatest. And that is why each night, it is only when the music turns up a notch – a loud guitar solo, or perhaps a fevered not from the singer – I realise that it’s dark, my computer will be just a dull, yet needed light.
And then as I contemplate the faults of the other greats, and how I’ll remove them, one by one, my screensaver, the one I’ve never changed, will come on, and I’ll be bathed in unsettling darkness.
--
I leave the computer at the end of the chapter and go to my fridge. It’s one of those fridges that
live empty (remain empty) because, more often than not, I can’t find time to buy groceries.
I never actually intended to write a story. But then, I felt possessed. It took over my time, and my energy, and it scared me for a while.
Especially that I could delve into this world, a depressing, insatiably cruel place, so often, and that I’d willingly do it, exposing myself to so much…
It’s not that it’s hard, to pull the words out of the dry air and make them lusciously ripe enough to enjoy in a story. But the thoughts that come with it make it brutal and
a hard (hard) thing to endure. My mind burns sometimes; it makes it so hard to write with my computer. But it’s a goal that I’ve started on: once started, I don’t stop til the story
does(ends). That’s it, that’s my mantra. And it gets me through the critiquing and the cringing in shame at how right those critiques are.
--
“Where have you been?”
That question is so common nowadays, I hear it in my sleep. “Where are you? Did you forget to call me? I sent you an email… is your phone out of battery? I’ve texted you a million times…”
What else can you say? “Sorry, it’s been really hectic,” I reply.
My brother looks at me suspiciously. “You’re never around anymore. What’s going on?”
“
Work. Uni. Stuff. The usual (Work, uni and stuff as usual)” It’s easier and easier to keep the lies tripping off my tongue, and to be quite honest, it’s pretty appalling how I never get caught out. I mean, shouldn’t I have been discovered by now? I must have stuffed up by now.
But no. “Well… we should get you out sometime. Get you doing normal stuff. Are you free any time soon?” he asks. He pushes his floppy black hair out of his eyes, looking at me still with that sceptical look of an eyebrow up and arched to unbelievable heights. It’s something I’ve always been jealous of.
“Erm… well. It’s a bit difficult to say, really. Everything’s so piled on right now.” I’m avoiding eye contact here, fiddling warily with my t-shirt hem, and at the sprouting little threads at odd angles.
He becomes exasperated with me then, and snaps, “Look. Just call, OK? I’m not busy. I’m free whenever you are. But if you don’t start living soon, you’re not going to be sane for much longer.”
[Since when has he known anything?]
--
It becomes a life half lived;
vivir con miedo, es como vivir a medias. The only thing that I stop to do is
watch a movie (wathcing a movie). I’ve become addicted to Baz Lurhmann. His flashy, bright addictive movies make me relaxed, and that line sticks in my head for no particular reason. I am not living in fear, I tell myself, I am not living a half-life. I know it’s a lie. But why, why admit it.
Your fear is failure.
--
Night, day, night, day, night, day, passing, like the cars on a German autobahn, but it doesn’t bother me.
Some nights, I add 5 pages, typed in that default font on Windows. And sometimes,
I even make a reasonable effort to a beginning, one that draws people in, and that I feel proud of for about 20 seconds. The read-over, punctuated with my Critic’s voice, makes me feel instantly disgusted.
I like living alone. It avoids everyone’s scrutinising eyes, their insanely unappreciative sense for the art and skill of writing. I can get on in peace.
I once heard – I think, maybe, it was before I discovered writing, on my Pride and Prejudice DVD, the new one, that sits collecting dust on my TV – that Jane Austen purposely set herself up in the room of her house that had a creaking door. So she wouldn’t be interrupted; she valued her privacy, so she would know if anyone was coming, and she’d quickly throw down her quill onto the paper, and cover it.
The door shakes with the power of a thudding knock, and that knock repeats itself over and over and over. I push down the screen of my laptop with alarming alacrity and go to the door.
My brother pushes himself inside. “Nice to see you too.”
“Bloody hell! Where are the lights? Put them on! It’s 9 o’clock! What are you doing with no lights on?” He looks at me angrily. “Don’t even tell me you’re sleeping, either. You’re clearly dressed.”
“Look, I’m just watching a movie.”
“You don’t watch movies until the weekend. Don’t pull that with me.”
“What’s it matter?” I flick on a light and blink repeatedly at how it blinds me. “It’s oh
-KAY. I’m fine. Don’t you trust me, or something?”
He sighs resignedly. “I’m just worried. That’s all.”
“Don’t be. Alright?” I look at him, with my perfected, I am the baby sis and I am completely fine look.
“How can you ask me to do that?” He shakes his head. “You never call, you never reply to my texts, you never even email anymore. You’re just… keeping inside. And it’s not you.”
“I’m just loaded over with uni stuff, OK?” I insist. “And work’s a nightmare. I’ve got so many shifts I can’t count.”
“No, you don’t. I checked. I asked them to cut you down. They said if they cut down your shifts any more, you’d be replaced.”
“Why are you doing this?!”
“I’ll stop when you become normal again! Don’t. Don’t try to push me out.”
“Go away, alright. Just leave.”
And he does, and he vanishes in the darkness, and I shut the door as quickly as I can to retreat to my world. The computer screen lights up automatically, a welcome, trusting person in my world of distrust, and I continue with my creation.
--
I finish. It’s strange, 3 long years of my life, down to 700 A4 pages. I feel lonely. Cold. The computer and I are no longer companions; I cannot bear to look at my pitiful excuse for a story because it just disgusts me so horribly. Each time I read it the critics would be in greater abundance and that made me… insane? I have no clue.
I open all the windows, curtains, doors – they stayed closed for so long because, back when I first began to write, I closed them and forgot to open them again. My house reeks, it is so musty and it feels like there has been no one living there. Not even me.
Well, I haven’t been, really.
What I did, could you call it living? I don’t know.
I call my brother’s number. Someone else picks up. “Hello? Is David Jacobsen there?” I say. My voice sounds different. Kind of cracked and raw, from disuse,
except in my crazy undertones from when I hurriedly read my manuscript.
“Uh, Jacobsen?” There’s a man on the other end; I can hear a TV in the background, tuned to Neighbours, I think, or Home and Away. “There hasn’t been a Jacobsen here for ages.”
“Oh. Never mind, then. Sorry.” I hang up quickly and sit, frustrated, on the couch. I open the computer again. Before, it was my utopia. Now the computer is just a revelation of what dystopia truly is. I avoid hovering over the blue Microsoft Word icon, like I am used to doing. Instead I click on the Internet button and type in my email.
There are emails, but from a year ago. That’s the soonest one. I click on it. My brother has invited me to a wedding. His. To some girl I have never even heard of. Then, an email from a joined address, telling me I’m an aunty now. I look at the others and they’re very much the same. My brother’s have petered into nothingness.
I hunt down my mobile, and plug it into its charger. I turn it on and wait. It shows me so many texts. From friends. From my brother. I don’t read them; I throw my phone away and grab the copies of the manuscript on my table, in their matching yellow packages, with their different addresses.
--
The trip outside makes me sad, and the way people look at me makes it worse. I am thin, I am looking so empty, and my eyes are rimmed in black from a lack of extensive sleep.
I don’t look normal, vivir con miedo, es como vivir a medias. The fear still exists, but in a way of, Will it get accepted?? Will I get my goal?
--
And then, the letters come, the emails, and none of them are what I expected. I cut my finger opening them.
It hasn’t. Rejected by them all, minor ones too, and it’s so unfair I just want to cry. It repulsed me, to be sure, but why them also? It was perfection; a standard, textbook perfect: WHY? It’s a thought in my reverie. And I… I don’t know. I don’t exist as sane. I don’t. I wish I had changed it. Wishing takes fear over. And repulsion lingers darkly underneath.
--
The story ended in the room, a dark and dank and dreary place to exist as a whole and then… then. The wishing started and it made it impossible to even pause at the door to the room, a toe lingering on the threshold of entering, because those thoughts and pulses radiated violently and hurt even those trying to come close. And it hurt.
Each day wishing reverted to remembering, and that remembrance brought fear, and that hurt. Hurt hurt hurt.
The room was locked. And it shut down, like winter.
--
Yes... it's very strange. But help me, can I fix it?
