Exit Here

I believe in signs. Messages. Divine intervention. Fate. The order of things. A predestined road. Whatever you want to call it. I choose the less eloquent label; signs. I think everything leads you where you are supposed to be. Lately, the reflective letters in my headlights seem to be directing me to toward writing an actual bone-a-fide full length book. I have one in full swing. Ive been writing it for years. But it, unfortunately, is too true. Chapter 1 would destroy enough illusions and piss off just the right amount of "important" people in my life to disrupt my current highly relative life stability. It's simply too true. I'll have to go the way of Dickenson and have it discovered (hopefully as complete as my life will be) after I've gone permanently into a hermit shell and moved on to the next life. It's just too true.

So, what then? I'm no good at fiction. What in the world is the use of such an interesting, often tragic yet somehow inspiring, nothing held back, mistake and recovery riddled, rich, colorful life if I have to create fiction to put on paper.

And then there's this thought: My life has been a series of choices I made consciously or subconsciously that led to a lot of pain, anger, trauma, turmoil. Yes, I recovered time and again and did that inspirational poster thing where I turned it all into wisdom or added its internal consequences to my store of personality quirks that create a stew that most people I encounter tend to have a taste for. What didn't kill me made me quite a bit cooler and all that. But I've had my share of things that tried to kill me. Literally and figuratively.

So how would the truth come across? I'd tend to vote that I'd come across as self-absorbed whining victim. But maybe it'd be fearless warrior.  Will I look like a heroine or a self-pitying sniveling bitch? Would I be able to include the positives among the mess of mistakes? Would I be able to truly portray how responsible I feel for making the desicions that led me through a maze of abuse, betrayal, hate, unraveling. Would I be able to explain the monster I became sometimes and the mouse I became other times. Would everything I am make more sense to everyone around me or would it turn my life upside down to let ALL of the bony dust covered things out of my impressively sized closet and collect them under one dust jacket? I vote that my life would flip. But my life has, thus far, been an Olympic qualifying gymnast.  Would one more flip matter?

And another thought occurs to me. How do I go back and tell these stories, my seven or so of nine lives, in short form. How do you summarize a culmination of microbe to Pacific events and really get to the heart of it. I guess that's all left to the craft of the pen. The brush must create the total portrait on one canvas.

So, maybe I'm left with fiction. Maybe.