Character study: Split rivers

To investigate the sum of all of your parts, the true meaning of your identity, ideas, emotional joys and malaise, some people look to multiple facets to understand that whole. As a writer, I have explored myself in my work. I keep the character separate with their own history, dilemmas, hopes and dreams. However, the deep roots of creating realistic characters has a vein that crawls close to my heart. Here is series of haiku that represents parts of who I am, what I represent and hope to give to others, and my deep personal perspective on my identity.

This particular set is made up of the characters for my recently published novel The Half Paper Moon. Here is the link to the Golden Storyline Books website, and the link to the Amazon page for the paperback version and e-book for Kindle.

Part One: Barbara

The pain of whipped bark

Roots take new shape, love in cues

Your love: veins in stream

The thesis verses the analysis: I have long had small clues to my feelings being linked toward a strange feeling of disconnect with my own body. For many years, my body would not react on the same patterns and feelings my other peers and friends would relay to me. Intimacy in particular was a different experience that felt labored rather than truly shared. The deep connection of intimacy and love is something that only comes with ease of trust, communication and commitment. Barbara is one who feels this way about love, and intimacy as well. The grasp of having asexual tendencies was a revelation to me. Barbara finds a deep sort of love, one that deepens her understanding of her own personal feelings about her body and mind, with her long-time best friend and confidant, Connie.

Part two: Connie

Death isn’t just loss

You feel lost, your soul falls flat

Sending prayers in loops

The thesis verses the analysis: Grief ties you in knots and leaves you scrambling to find the way to relieve the pressure. That pressure never stops and finds itself funneling through your nervous system and eventually, your very skin and your every bone. It’s an ache you can’t fix. Once you lose someone you really needed by your side, physically or emotionally, it truly feels like all you thought you once knew about that person is gone and in the process, you feel stripped away. It feels like a betrayal. It feels like a stab in the gut, heart and back. You pray and hope and yearn. Life has other things in store. Connie has to cope with this loss two-fold at the loss of her girlfriend, Barbara: in the way she believed she knew her and now, in the possibility of her being physically lost or passed away. I have dealt with both of these situations in different ways. Inevitably, it leads to who I am as a person and how I react to things out of my control. That’s all we can do, is control our own destiny.

Part three: John

Deep fried nerves sewn shut.

Noxious clouds hide in sunset.

Am I bad to love?

The thesis verses the analysis: Feelings feel like murder to some. It kills you to feel opposite to how everyone else does. The strain of these emerging variants of feelings make you feel like a pariah of the highest sort. Loving someone who can’t love you back. Loving someone who everyone will judge you for. Being yourself knowing you could be wronged, beaten or killed. This is how John feels as he tries to protect himself from his deepest fears and desires. It’s a question that I have also asked myself time and time again.

End: I hope you embrace yourself in a loving way and never give up. Agony and grief will inevitably find itself creeping in your life, in layers or tides. This is the most important time of your life, to show yourself and the world what you’re made of. It’s okay to fall, to cry and be afraid. You are made of something beautiful and irreplaceable. You are whole as you are now. The feelings of something new like anger, fear, your lost identity to trauma and pain of loss is something we all can share as one with each other. Let us lean on this and remember we are all here trying to figure out the what and how and why and where of ourselves. It’s a journey. Not a destination.