Spreading like a plague.

So we registered strangeandsavage.com in my name tonight.

The project is… the secondary, parallel track to my impulses to make things. Stories come first, but images are a close second.

Watch this space.

 

Bridge-ghosts

I don’t have your email address anymore. Hoping the link finds you, and you click it, and you read all these words I’m scribbling while the thoughts are in my head. You’re in my head today, very much, and I think it’s time I let the ghost out.

I have unfinished business with you. No, don’t close the window! It’s not bad. Well, not really. Not for you. This is an apology.

I was horrible. I was broken, and not by you; grievously wounded, and not by you; deeply mourning, but not you. You were just… there. You, with all the innocence of a small bird fluttering to the ground inside a cattery, made yourself a target by doing what was unarguably best for you, and I was dreadful to you. I had a lifetime of fury and bloody gashes stored up and hidden away and I couldn’t hide the bloodstains anymore.

I am so terribly, terribly sorry. You recognised, probably entirely instinctively, what a mess I was inside, and understood that you couldn’t afford to get tangled up in it– and there were so very many threads to get snarled in. What a tattered, patternless spider’s web my head was… I don’t blame you for severing that particular tie.

And I realise for my own part that but for my stupidity and my unpardonable behaviour, we could still be friends. I burned that bridge. I stood in the middle of it and sprayed my acid bitterness like gasoline all over it and spitefully dropped the match that sent it uncontrollably blazing under my feet, and God help me, I welcomed the burn on my skin. The anger propped me up while I mourned… and again– I wasn’t mourning you.

You bore the punishment others earned.

I can only apologise, and this I do, here and now in the open, where anyone can see it, in the hopes that one of the anyones who do will be you. You deserved none of the vitriol I gave you. If I could take it back, I would. I spent a while not thinking about it all, because doing so hurt, and I wouldn’t look at why… but the why of it is simply that I’m ashamed of myself. I was dreadful to you. I am so incredibly sorry.

I’ve said hello a few times in the intervening years. Waved in passing, as it were, but nothing more than that, not really, because this has been in the way, the need for these words. I’ve kept tabs, a little bit, although it’s been difficult: you were always so private, and I’m closed out, now, so what I get are glimpses here and there, allowed me by mutual friends and acquaintances and what I can glean from the occasional writings I stumble upon. I hope you’re doing well. I hope you’re in a good place. I hope happiness for you, because I loved you once, and because I think of you fondly still. My regrets are twofold: that I behaved so terribly, and that the bridge is burned.

I wish sometimes I could build another, of different structure and design, one meant for longer friendship, rather than to close the gap I was trying then to define or, really, ignore. I don’t know if I can… but the wish is there.

 

Sideways

I’m reading Booklife, by Jeff VanderMeer, and am finding it fascinating going. It’s not, lest anyone be misled, a how-to manual; it is, as Jeff told me, a strategy guide, and an incredibly intuitive one. Am learning much.

Am learning, from it and from observing discussions in his blog (this one in particular) that I’m coming at all of this obliquely, sidling sideways between the rawly creative aspects of writing a story, and the business end of things. I’m hard-put to decide which I find more fascinating, and whether or not I’m doing myself a disservice by this approach, or if I’m doing it right. All I know is I don’t think I can do it any other way. My instincts lead me thusly.

I wish I could speak about this topic more clearly. I’m still stirring the mud with my toes, and I won’t really know what it’s all about, in the gut, until I’ve felt the crawfish bite my toes and the catfish swish by.

 

Long shot, I know-

-mostly because I have just about nil for readers yet, but just in case:

This is Dogwood.

Dogwood needs a new home.  His family, because of recently-discovered medical issues, can’t care for him any longer, and are trying very hard to find someone else for him to love and be loved by so they don’t have to turn him over to the Humane Society.  Can you take him in?  Do you know someone who can?

Re-post, if you can.  I dunno why but this one got me.

It’s probably because he’s grey.  I have a soft spot for all-grey kitties.