santos scribes

I can’t decide if it’s real -this place I visit in my mind- a parallel universe or only real imagined copy-pasted pieces from every magazine I’ve ever skimmed, the hundreds of storied books I’ve read once or twice about women and what their lives could or should be like.  

This place I’ve created (that lives contentedly in my mind) I’ve taken to calling The Other Place.

What comes next, I’m calling Part 1

It’s freer there, in The Other Place and I admire and envy the freedom this other me experiences: the simplicity & quiet of an empty back road, the sort of winding independence that exists only between dense unincorporated lots, the lack of need for schedules and locks, for clocks that keep time, for anti-anxiety meds to help keep cool.  

In the absence of all this, is the ever-changing sparkle of a clean blue lake. It stands watch over a once dilapidated cottage. Both the cottage and the lake now veracious and alive, live just three thrown stones from one another.  

Decades ago, when I was smart and not yet wise, I paid a local stranger with an angled smile to bring the forgotten forest shanty back to life. I was smart, because I knew I’d need a place to return to no matter how my life turned out, no matter the wisdoms I did or did not amass with time.  

I didn’t have much of anything to offer by way of payment back then- but it turns out in both places kindness goes a long way, presence too- so I paid the kind man in chicken meatballs and salty boiled pasta, in attentive smiles and remembered details and in time, he replaced each rotted floorboard, each rusted out, bent nail and even the flue of the great broken chimney. He spent an entire spring and summer and most of a fall, bringing fresh flesh to the cabin’s old bones and when he was finished and spring came again, I began building something of my own. 

Anchored to the far wall of my favorite room, above all the newly laid flooring and beneath the freshly tinned roof, I staked ground and laid layers and stone where just days and moments before there had been only nothingness. I stacked slab after slab of gray and white rock like a grandmother and grandchild making playful piles with their slap-happy hands and I thought- for a while- this is it. 

I believed in the heft and sureness of the bricks and stone, the rock and maple wood mantle, the jutting seat of inglenook. I thought the beauty and design, the safety & containment, was something more then bright faculty, something more then innovation and science. I mistook the warmth of captivity for a kind of flightless freedom, an imposing African elephant smiling from the inside of its city block zoo.

Here, in the beginning, I believed all those beauty bound bricks and silent cold slabs, the scant proof of my existence, was it; was what I needed, was what was missing in The Place Place.

But in time and hindsight, I learned just how wrong a person can be. 

about this work

stay tuned this summer as I either pass or fail at attempted fictional realism story writing..xo, S.