Writing of the Week. Week One: New
The prompt for week one was new.
To me 2020 sounds like the most futuristic year since 2000, but in reality, I’m at a high school friend’s New Year’s Eve party two months after my childhood home burned down in a fire. Can you even call it a wildfire anymore if it blows through towns like a stiff breeze?
I had just moved back in with my parent’s that summer, finishing my final two years of college studying linguistics. I hadn’t gotten a job yet and I had nowhere to go, so I went back.
Home hadn’t changed much since I’d been gone. The mint had gotten out of control on the side yard and instead of a front lawn, there was gravel, bushy grasses, and cacti.
“It saves on the water bill,” my dad said when I asked about it.
He would never say it was to save the water itself. If it wasn’t for money, it wasn’t for anything.
Take me moving back home. I paid a small amount of rent, far less than I would in the real world, and I helped with chores around the house. I was cheaper than hired labor, my dad would say as I emptied a full lawnmower bag into the green waste bin. The backyard was still grass.
We had many arguments about how I couldn’t or didn’t find a job. I know part of it was that I focused on coursework my final year when other folks were interviewing. My dad was convinced it was because my studies were career-less.
I tried early on to contextualize my academic interests with something someone would pay me to do. I knew I loved linguistics, so I thought maybe I could pair it with computer science. The problem was I hated programming. Everything about code made me frustrated and clammy. I would be up late in my bed, illuminated by the cold light of my laptop while frantically trying to get the output I’d intended.
Then the house burned down in a fire, something that we’d come to fear each October ever since the altogether surprising fire storm in 2017. My parents up and moved out of the state, no longer feeling any attachment to a place that would scorn them like that, and I had to rent out a bedroom in a house full of strangers paid for by serving wine at a tasting room, a job I was very happy to have gotten. At least I’d successfully decluttered, a resolution I could firmly tick off before even starting the year.
So here, now, I am shoving my face with charcuterie tidbits, getting plumb drunk on other people’s champagne, and listening to the parents of people I went to high school with talk about the people they know who’d lost their homes. They react with their heads cocked, brows crinkled with a surface-level compassionate, “Oh, how sad.”
I am one of them, obviously, but I decide not to tell them that because it seems like it would bring them down to know a displaced was among them.
Then I hear a voice coming from the living room, across the kitchen from me.
“The world isn’t some warm, soft ear to whisper your sweet nothings into anymore,” the voice says. It has my full attention.
I peek my head out of the kitchen and see her. She still has that swooping nose, the mole on her chin, eyebrows darker than her complexion would indicate. Her hair is dyed red now, fading slightly, but I know that voice. It’s Kara Young.
She had been in my classes throughout high school. In those times she had been opinionated, a know-it-all, and she voraciously read romance novels whenever she was bored in class. My junior year I was hopelessly in love with her. Not her actually, I didn’t know her that well, but what I conceived of her.
I had always been kind of annoyed by her, but eventually she’d grabbed so much of my attention that I decided that annoyance had been a defense mechanism for my true feelings.
She dated a lot of people in high school but never me.
“No,” she says, arguing with a boy wearing a college sweatshirt, probably someone’s younger brother. “The world is a tough leather bag that you can’t take anything out of that you didn’t put in first.”
He widens his eyes and wrinkles his face in irritation. Clearly he is no longer interested listening to her.
“You know as a society we’ve been systematically degrading our soil for years. Somehow homeowners have been convinced that one, they should grow a monoculture of grass on their land instead of say fruit trees or lettuce or beans – anything useful – and two, that they should cut this grass with powered equipment and throw that grass out into a bin where any of its conceivable usefulness is taken away. It’s all backwards.” She flings her hand into the air dramatically.
“Who would want to keep their grass clippings?” the boy says, having paid enough attention to continue to argue.
“It could be used as a natural fertilizer, in compost. If you just leave it be it’s better than having the city haul it off away from the land that produced it.” She is cupping a glass of red wine and it sloshes about as she angrily gesticulates.
I’d heard about her older brother as told about by our AP English Literature teacher as either a cautionary tale or some sort of retrospective. He’d decided to forgo college and instead work at a local farm collective. Our teacher explained that the boy had been heavily inspired by Walden and that as a teacher he was conflicted about his influence. I wonder if Kara was wooed by the farm life too.
I realize now that the conversation has gone quiet and I’ve been staring at her and now she is looking at me.
I shake my empty champagne flute at her and head back into the kitchen. I feel like I’m back in high school doing things that don’t make sense because I’m not sure how people work yet. I set the glass down on the counter next to the sink and snake around some women taking a fresh baked lasagna out of the oven.
Ah yes, the new years tradition of too much booze and a whole tray of lasagna.
I walk along the dark hallway past the family room, seeing a ring of light around the bathroom door. My escape plan is foiled. I keep walking, out into the cool garage.
I open the fridge there. This will be my excuse. It’s starting to make sense now. Empty champagne flute wave means that I’m out and would prefer a beer.
I’m in the fridge scooting aside energy drinks when I hear the door to the garage open.
“I was hoping I would find you out here.”
It’s Kara’s voice. I stay in the fridge knowing I’ll need to come out soon.
“Hey,” I say. I grab two cans of craft beer. I exit the fridge. “Here,” I say, turning to face her. She’s wearing a pointed party hat with a little elastic band under her chin.
She takes the beer and leans against the wall between the steps and the plywood shelving. She’s looking lanky, her head cocked.
“What are you doing back in town?” she asks.
“I, uh, work at a winery,” I say.
She nods loosely. “I moved back too.”
“Do you live with your parents?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Did you ever meet my brother?” She asks, “Andy?” She seems restless, her body constantly moving.
I shake my head. “I heard about him,” I say.
“We live together,” she says. “We have some property a little north of here. It’s a bit in the sticks, but I like it.”
“Was it affected by the fire?” I ask.
“Only smoke,” she says. Her voice is becoming raspier, almost a whisper.
I nod and finally open my beer with a hiss.
“You lost your house,” she says. Her voice gives out at the end.
I nod as I take a long sip.
“I am sorry about that,” she says. She looks into my eyes and I don’t feel like I’m in high school anymore.
“Why are we here?” I hear myself ask.
“At this party? I guess we had nothing better to do.” She takes the party hat off and rubs the underside of her chin. “Do you want to try it on?” she says, holding the hat up, still leaning against the wall.
She comes to me, stretching out the elastic. “Lean down,” she says. “You’re too tall.”
I lean down and she puts the hat on me. Her fingers are cold against the bottom of my chin as she adjusts the elastic.
She smiles up at me, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “You look great,” she says. Then she gets on her toes, puts her hands on my shoulders, and kisses me.
It isn’t something slobbery and drunk. I can taste the IPA on her lips as I’m sure she can on mine, but I don’t feel like we’re outside of ourselves.
She steps back and then resumes her position against the wall.
“Do you still read romance novels?” I ask.
She purses her lips bemusedly, her eyes glittering. “Yes,” she says. “And I plant trees, I argue with meatheads, and I still want to know more than the other people I’m in a room with. But I’m happy now.”
“Are you happy?” she asks.
I can’t look at her in the eyes anymore. My eyes shift until they find a crack in the paved garage floor. “No,” I say, “but I think I could get there.”
She peels herself away from the wall and turns towards the steps leaving the garage. “You should come to my property sometime,” she says. “I find it helps with those kinds of things.”
I follow her up the cement steps, back into the party.
Prompts for the rest of the month:
discoholicmusic
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
annaxmalina
areudirty
jacobvanloon
kaledo-art
titsay
jbbartram-illu