Kind of the First

Truthfully, it has no title. Its current rendition has nothing in common with its origin, and as daring as I thought it was, it was half unofficial military journal, half retooled events with an unfathomable connection to the former. It was disjointed from chapter to chapter with characters, much like now, that are poorly named and swore a lot. Most of it followed me from dropping out of college, traveling abroad (sort of), and surviving the first year of training laced with sanity-slipping. Seven hundred and 53 pages of Microsoft Word textual brain cell dumping putting depraved bandmates through a hell that would be the most insufferable sadistic tortures if they happened to one person. Alas, or thank whatever god suits your fancy, it’s gone.

Then the hiss.

After my fist went through the laptop screen, I stopped writing for one year. My barracks flooded thanks to shotty plumbing, something the government never reimbursed me for, and drowned the thing. I wasn’t put off so much mishandled by a system streamlined to apathetic oblivion. Drones of doctors medicating with theories half-handily slap happily through the path of mental stability and longevity if the meds don’t lead to a mental illness statistic. It was the last of these stents after a particular lousy date (not that there was dinner and a movie involved) that the rubber pens of blue ink awkwardly scribbled for twelve pages. The Wild Trapeze.

My first classic. The crescendo of the hiss morphs into a voice, although still void of reason. It starts with an out-of-control patient (go figure) troubled with an unfortunate fate of a relationship wearing the scars of their most recent debacle. They called it a break, but honestly, it was a way to deny them access while they healed. Meanwhile, in ignoring sleep, and medical advice, falling prey to the oh, so alluring confirmation of delusions of grandeur, (who?) they discover the hidden world of truly divine healthcare. Unaware night staff are subverted for the infinite plain of patients basking in the eternally revolving speakeasy where they are forced to become the main attraction, center-ring. Or, at least, its meal.

It remained a deafening hiss through the first semester of an automotive degree until I started to work on my first actual project. Rereading it put me in a dizzying, unyielding chair whizzing through a tunnel of steaming, fizzing stripes, each howling horrors in my eyes until I heard them the way they demanded. While I can’t understand what the feeling was or how it persists beyond several projects figuratively (you sure?) soaked in blood from fingertips going numb four hours after a Sunday sunset. What a graduation to find the admiration of the mechanics that it takes to let a person sit comfortably at a hundred twenty miles an hour between old people and construction cones pales compared to finishing chapter 27; 28 already lined up for the bitter end.

Whether I love it, hate it, drown in it out, or be drowned by it, the hiss, the ever-present coincidence of thinking of words I’ve never heard of only to find their definition fixing my current paragraph dam, it continues. An all-over-the-place mind of land mines only the ballerina in me can navigate through (map included) quailed to a gingerly farce that, if done right, could do something…. A galivanting of inner typhoon winds unhindered by an expressly laid purpose of searching for what that word means, finding the real face behind the raspy hiss of the Trapeze (Really?) No.

This fuel is infinite as suns leading said farce to progress without hope but education, style without compromise, and an editing process that’s remarkably so-so. No more disorganized jaunts into worlds that lead nowhere, like where it comes from. The first story to be taken as a form of expression proves I know English and can say something comprehendible. Grow for growth’s sake to scribble to enlightenment; better than realizing there is meant to be an apostrophe in the second ‘growth.’ To loaf in a writing hiccup is now a crisis zone to challenge the meek civility that I never really understood anyway. It has become a refuser, a rebellious colluder with fears and malice to make sense of the desire to use a rickety bridge over a ravine as a trampoline.