Tragic

"The snow began to fall as we stood out on the driveway, middle of suburbia. Quaint and picturesque, the snow draped down upon us, and we were overcome by a slight chill as the midnight air blew by, whipping the white sultry substance between us. We stood there, a small distance between, yet worlds apart. I could feel the great weight of guilt and moral conscience beating down on me; and I could see, really see the disappointment in her face. Before she turned around to get into her car, she placed a small envelope in my jacket pocket. Before I could think twice about it, she was gone – her tires churning slowly through the inches of snow that covered the road. Little reddish dots faded off into the distance, and I stood there to contemplate the moon – grotesquely large and crater pocked, winking down at me and trying to console me.

A long and storied relationship gone, I had torn the pages out one by one to get consumed into the conflagration of angry, obtuse passion. The jealous rage subsiding as the ashes fell to the earth, filling my lungs with the very destruction we had wrought. A bittersweet ending was the least we deserved. Unfortunately, young and beautiful couples are supposed to go through such anxiety."

-- excerpted from "The Snooze Button," an altogether semi-autobiographical account of my blissfully reposed self

This passage is one of my favorites from the small collection of my personal creative writing cache. I think writing this and wanting to return to the feeling that writing this imbued within me ultimately turned me on to the idea of the craft of story writing, in short and long form. I wrote the majority of this story during Thanksgiving break of my junior year at Wabash. For those who know, that was a tumultuous time in my life for a variety of reasons. The weeks before and after that Thanksgiving were, for all intensive purposes, the darkest moments of my brief life.

The story is a simple one: boy meets girl, boy and girl respectively have significant others, boy and girl share romantic tryst, and boy gets ass handed to him by girl's beau. Now, the conception for this plot line had been formed early in the semester when there were no outward signs that the current relationship was headed for disaster. The bulk of the writing took place when I had come back to Cleveland for Thanksgiving. During that time, the story had ballooned from a simple 8 pages (double-spaced) to a megalith of 25 pages in length (double-spaced). The short-story was part of a writing assignment for my creative writing class in short fiction. The professor would later remark that the story was "patiently told." I immediately cringed at the mention and took it to be a bold-faced lie. "Patiently told," was the phrase that entered my ear, but "extremely long," was the phrase that registered in my brain's conversational log.

I remember the moments before that Thanksgiving break well. I had to finish a problem set for my course in classical mechanics before leaving the next day on the night before break. As such, Tonya and her friend Richelle left me to my own devices to go party. I thought nothing of it, as I had foolishly allowed such activities to become commonplace. I reasoned that she could go party elsewhere, and I relished the realization that she would ultimately come home to me. All the while, I could get to work, since I undertook a very difficult academic schedule that semester. I stopped working on the problem set, leaving it unfinished and slowly the worry began to creep into my system. I decided that I would continue work in the upstairs common areas of the house, thinking that getting away from my room would equate to forgetting about her. I moved myself to an even more remote location by locking myself within the trophy room, taking pleasure from the fact that when she would return (and she would, I convinced myself heartily) I would be nowhere to be found.

Slowly, my ambition to solve problems of classic mechanics became overtaken by the worry that Tonya would not be returning this evening. I let my attention be diverted by the random artifacts within the trophy room. I tried taking a nap there. Soon, I gave up and returned to my room.

I took my frustration out on a poorly installed air-conditioner once I got back to my room. The air-conditioner was tenuously propped into the window opening, from where I had removed the window at the beginning of the semester in order to make room for the air-conditioner. The gaping hole that existed above the air-conditioner in the opening was covered poorly by a cardboard presentation board and a lot of duct tape. Removing the air-conditioner proved simple enough. Installation of the window proved to be one of the most difficult tasks I had ever undertaken at two in the morning. During this time of great frustrations, Tonya decided to finally call. After much encouragement, she finally gave up her location: the Beta house. We argued very loudly. I threw the phone against the brick wall in my room and ended the conversation rather abruptly. Eventually, she showed up, but I would have nothing of it. I ran away in my socks, wearing an inadequate amount of clothing for the weather. I hid up the steps leading to the gym behind a large column and waited, satisfied in the knowledge that I was being sought for. After a long while and seeing Eric drive his Monte Carlo around campus in search of me, I quietly returned to my room. Tired from the fighting and the emotions, I fell asleep holding Tonya in my usual fashion.

The next morning, I politely asked Eric if he would, instead of Tonya, drive me to the airport.

I believe that the stress and trauma induced by the event that preceded my Thanksgiving break that year gave me ample reason to reflect upon my first meaningful, long-term relationship with a girl. Elizabeth was a good girl. And the hallmark image of that relationship, as is registered in my brain's romance log, is that of our first kiss, which took place in my driveway as the snow gently fell to the earth. It was nighttime, and the light emitted by the street lamp provided a soft and embracing glow. She left soon thereafter in her car, to make the long drive back to Akron. I stood and watched her leave. This was an altogether happy experience. A simple twist though can turn a happy experience into a tragic one. And I think that's what I was going for in this story, to capture the tragedy of adolescence and form some meaningful thought upon maturation.

With my bulky story nearly completed and ready for critical review by my peers, I was not extraordinarily amused when my actual life began to follow a perversed version of my fictitious plot line. Instead of acting the wit in the romantic comedy that became my life, I endured the troubling role of the cuckolded partner. I got to act the enraged, jealous, cheated boyfriend; but nevertheless got my ass handed to me all the same. Soon the Beta in question had a face and a name. The night before I would leave Crawfordsville for home during the Christmas break, Tonya would ditch me once again. Unfortunately, I knew where to find her. My purpose was simply to break away from her for good. I needed to make that bold pronouncement that very instant, in order to quell the dark worry that had eaten away at my insides; the dark worry that made punching myself in the stomach and slapping myself across the face into a novel idea. This dark worry made the injestion of large doses of Nyquil seem like a pleasant escape from reality. Unfortunately, Nyquil is no match for the anxiety produced by such darkness. Thus, the only way to part with this darkness was to disavow knowledge of the person causing such distress. I walked straight into that house but ended up lying injured and weary in the snow, dragged down the flight of a stone staircase in the chilly night air, yelling obscenities at a stranger who was the misplaced object of my hatred.

I left for home and would come back to Wabash an altogether new person.