Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Can you please give me some constructive criticism on a story I'm turning in for English? Please?

I saw her walking to the house, like a fly drawn to a fire. Sauntering down the path in post-alcoholic pride, her thoughts dizzy with intoxication, ambling with no sense of the monumental loss she's just had. Maybe she'll wake up, hungover, the next day and call me being incredibly sorry. Maybe she'll call me when she's 27 from an AA meeting and thank me for the nights I saved her life. But since I know her, I know she'll just never realize it. She'll spin and jump and pirouette her way into the future, blissfully unaware, dying unashamed and unabashedly proud of the nights like this. As her back receded into the horizon, an old melody resurfaced to me. I didn't know the title, the artist. But the crooked beat flickered into focus in my mind. I called out to the night, I fought every urge to run after her and follow her or drag her back with me. But I knew this death had somehow resurrected the song in my head. I knew it was one or the other. I knew that one could be there for me infinitely more then the other. So I had to sing, in sake of me, to save me. I let the lyrics pour out of me as they materialized in my head. I wanted to make something tangible from the song, turn it into something so strong and real I could hold its hand and feel my tears hit it's sleeve with a nonchalant pit-pat. I'd close my eyes but still feel the dead air, the emptiness where her body used to be, her perfume and old breathe lingering around me in a loose imitation of her. I choked on the lyrics as they streamed from consciousness into reality. "Do what you want, cause I'll do anything, I'll take the blame/What's mine is yours, you can have all of it, I learned to beg" I mumbled the lyrics I'd forgotten, using her name and mine as convenient placeholders, then yelped the words I did know with desperation. "I know where you are running to, please come back, come back again/I know the truth when it's coming from you, please come back, oh come back again" My breathe was strong, and I ached for her to hear me somehow, to revel in a moment of serpentine telepathy, but I knew it wouldn’t happen, and it was ultimately better that way. This was the Last Hurrah of who were both were. "In your endless summer night, I'll be on the other side, when you're beautiful and dying, all the world that you've denied." And she certainly was beautiful. "When the water is too deep I will ease your suffering, when the glitter fades in morning turn away and you will find my empty eyes, your beauty blinds" I ended it on a repeat, a broken record of the last lines, singing them and repeating them so much that they'd be synchronized into my heart. Every fiber of my being constantly living and dying each slow century of the words. "I know that you are rotten to the core, I know that you don't love me anymore/I can't be near you, the light just radiates." This was my swan song, my curtain call. My requiem for the both of us. I buried myself as deep as I could in it, until I found a space in myself that was as vacant and abandoned as the night "I can't be near you, the light just radiates" It ended with an ear-piercing silence, just like everything else.

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