Creative Writing
So, this is a piece I wrote way back in my first week of my frist (second) semester of CW with mangreer and company.
Please Enjoy~
Letters to Freddie Mercury, and why writing to dead people is easier than keeping a conventional diary.
I don’t really like to sit down and recount things; I find it a task that is both monotonous and tedious and provides a rather mediocre account of what happens to me on a daily basis. I appreciate the people who can, like Whitney, who has a festive journal full of artistic supremacy that I could never match and frequently humbles me to the point of extinction. But then again, she draws in her diary, so it doesn’t really count.
I only pretend to draw compared to her.
Now writing - writing is something I can do. Just not in a diary. Diaries are, to specify my emotions toward them, stupid. I cannot even count the number of attempts I have made to present my day-to-day lifestyle on paper or cleaned out stacks of notebooks where such records have been tried. Each one always ends with the same sentence: “I’ll write again soon”. This must be code word for “I’m never going to write in this again, because it’s really dumb to write to myself. Thanks anyway though” because they remain shoved in the back of my closet, or in shoeboxes, or on shelves, or in a drawer, or under my old bed, or anywhere else I can stuff them and forget about them.
I do this in hopes that one day, the feeling will be renewed to restart, but it never happens. They always go unfinished and pathetically empty with perhaps a few novel ideas jotted down or how much I despise my brother, but nothing I couldn’t put anywhere else. They become silly and useless and in the end undergo that sacred metamorphosis into garbage. My family is less than supportive about the idea.
My Brother refers to it as “gay”, which as Vulcan Logic shows is completely ridiculous because writing in a diary is not pertinent to homosexuals at all, but to all, especially the heterosexual teenager, such as myself.
“It’s a good outlet. You can write all about how terrible your mother is.” This is what my mom usually says about everything, but particularly this, and it only detracts from the premises attractiveness. Thanks mom.
“Of course woman, you are horrible.” This is typically my reply to just about anything my Mother says, and vice versa.
My Father, as with everything, is completely indifferent.
But I still I yearn for that girlish need to just sit down and think about things that had happened to me; that uncontrollable urge to pretend that what I do routinely happens to be both extraordinary and perhaps so unthinkably interesting that I must immediately write it down for future reference. I guess this stems from the female’s natural tendency to dissect each gesticulation, and or communicated message of the opposite sex, i.e., the elusive and hard to understand male. That and document our own failures at conveying some kind of feedback to them.
How else are we expected to figure out if he likes us? By tracking their movements of course; no other way could be so logical. So the diary morphs into a kind of field guide, like the one I have on North-American birds. Not what I am about. Boys are, so as to show once again my range of emotion towards them, stupid. They are not even ripe until college so why bother before then?
But still, like a gorilla that is somehow pushed to nest, I was pushed to write down the monotony of my weekday occurrences, including the same driving seven-hour duration of school that barely even fluctuates from class period to class period. What a startling, dramatic revelation then, when I should come to discover my own unique niche in the world of journaling that seemed both pragmatic and amusing.
I would write letters. But not just any letters, oh no, but letters to people I truly admired and fawned over. More precisely, dead celebrities. Freddie was the first. Darling Freddie Mercury, the man after mine own heart, from his buck-toothed goofy face to that skin tight spandex. If only I had been born into my Mother’s shoes and listened to Queen like she did, in the light of the new experience and record players.
Though the date of this epiphany is uncertain, I do remember the keen details of its uncover: I had been listening to Princes of The Universe, my self proclaimed anthem, on repeat for the past thirty minutes and after finishing off a particularly tasty novel had stared at the un-cracked Italian leather journal my Grandmother had sent for Christmas. I looked around, hesitant, and picked it up, feeling the smooth pink surface in my hands, the pages widely ruled and virginally white.
Hopeless martyrs to the flames of my burned out system of writing in these things. That’s all I could think while flipping them around to see if maybe a bill or two had been tucked in the pages. Nothing. Just blank paper. I sighed, looking about me in some kind of procrastinating stupor, afraid that if I focused for too long, the worst would come to worst and I would end up with another failed project on my hands. My eyes wandered, straying towards my nightstand. My fingers twitched in accord and I tapped my tongue, clicking it on the roof of my mouth with loud, obnoxious, distracted pops.
There is a coffee cup that reads “UMARMY 2009” on my bedside table, and it houses a complete conglomeration of writing utensils, ranging from thick black sharpies to my favorite .5mm drawing pencil, a red one manufactured by a company no one’s ever heard of that is affectionately nicknamed ‘Rojo’ due to its deep crimson plastic shelling.
Rojo was eyeing me with a shred of challenge.
“I’m not going to start this dumb thing. It’s ridiculous.” I said out loud, answering the silent query, leaning my head back on my pillows, legs kicking out against my comforter. My bald knees kept staring up at me with bruised, abused faces, as if to see if I would really see it through. The beady, glossy eyes of my menagerie of stuffed animals gazed back, questioning. I picked up one of them from around me, surveying it with interest. It looked blankly back up at my unchanging face.
“Fine.” I muttered, before snippily adding “But only because I have nothing better to do with my time today.”
The animal then hit my wall with a slight thud, and the next thing I saw was my hand reaching for the black sharpie instinctively. If I was going to defile this journal, I was going to go big or go home.
I am immortal; I have inside me blood of kings…
The music and lyrics chimed in with my mood, one of destruction and of passionate glory. I was going to do it. This was it, I was going to accept the challenge and keep it up like a Spartan at war, and I was going to figure out whatever means it would take to see it through to the end.
Before I knew it the words were scrawled across the page in a curious arrangement.
I hadn’t even thought about it. It had just happened, right there, like the big bang or a chemical reaction.
Dear Freddie Mercury. Far more natural than “Dear Journal”.
I tried out the sentence, raking over it over and over again, like a piece of wood over hot coals, slowly deconstructing it, the ending comma hanging off like a half-pulled band aid or a tooth that you had when you were little but were too scared to pull completely out.
What would I want to tell Freddie Mercury in a letter that would never get a reply? What would I say to perhaps my greatest musical influence, whose talents I could only ballpark as astounding, to whose inspiring life I had attributed my lack of judgments and upholding of the arts? The answer was the simplest one I’d had in a long time – anything I wanted.
It was brilliant. It was like a super nova or a nebula. A factory of stars; of little, somewhat silly, gems of my life. It was questions I couldn’t ask out loud, or to my parents. It was ponderings that had no real purpose, it was all the little insecurities and cynicisms that I dared not reveal to the ever-watchful world of peers and friends I occupied. It was mature enough to be adult, the process of writing a letter where I would have to show not only respect to the one I was writing too, but I would also have to be something far more important: entertaining. After all, how could I possibly hope to hold Freddie Mercury’s attention in a boring letter?
It broke the chain of fear, of confliction and drama that had become ‘The Diary’. I had reached the nirvana of every teenage girl’s strives towards written immortality. I felt like Buddha. Heck, I felt like Jesus. It was just one more stretched out reach towards normalcy and ordinary, and when you’re sixteen, you pine for that.
This memory is one I will treasure, one of sincerest self discovery and an exploration of my more adventurous side. Since then, Freddie has been joined by several other deceased icons of our times and history: Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Monsieur Alexander Dumas, JFK, and such inspirational characters as Elvis and Frederick Chopin. Anyone I wish, though Freddie has become my favorite. He is an old friend, one I can talk to about anything, one who I take the time to write to.
Funny what adding Dear to someone’s name can do for you when you put it that way. And when you’re in a personal correspondence with Freddie Mercury, suddenly everything seems exceptionally profound.
I am describing myself as one artist to another, from one colleague to another, one politician to another.
I am able to express my condolences, my fears, my pride, my gratitude, my views and I know that they will be heard by wizened, trustworthy ears.
Reality says they are just memoirs of a teenager and her conflictions, but to me they mean that much more. They are for somebody, an unseen pen-pal, the invisible playmate ‘To Any Reader’ , as put by Robert Louis Stevenson’s in his ‘Leaves From a Child’s Book of Verses’, my Father’s favorite book to read to me when I was little.
Perhaps it was more of the idea that everyone has their own Freddie Mercury; it doesn’t have to be him, but I figure if he was willing to strut around wearing a crown and cape in front of thousands of people, he’d be willing to listen to do something as simple as listen to me.
Besides, he’s dead, so what’s he going to say about any of it?
Of course, now I blog.
So, what was your favorite part? Was it funny?
I'm trying out humor this semester, and want to know if you enjoyed it enough to pursue!
In other news, (OTHER THAN HAVING CREATIVE WRITING WITH MATT-MATT AGAIN) I am missing Whit because of my new schedule :< (check out her new blog. It's kickass). Went on that fantastic Fall retreat - I'll talk more about that tomorrow!
"Oh, my baby, when you're crying - never hide your face from me - I've conquered hell and driven out the demons, I've come with life to set you free." - Come To Jesus: Mindy Smith.
Listen to it. It's kind of awesome.
TV SCHEDULE:
- Mondays: Regular Show and Adventure Time, Scooby Doo Mystery Inc. and HIMYM
- Tuesdays: Being Human (MMMM. AIDEN)
- Thursdays: BBT, YOUNG JUSTICE (HELLLLS YESSSSS)
Picture of the Day:
Sailor Venus. Because She's blonde. I'm blonde.
She makes me happy. :'>
Made this. Every day needs more Ke$ha, narwhales, unicorns, and bears.
Oh, and majestic hair.
Oh, and high self esteem.
xoxo,
Hannah
