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Forgotten Friday: Sister, Single

March 27, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

A week from tomorrow, my sister will be married.

She’s incredible, as far as sisters go. Sure, she used to beat me mercilessly until I was old enough to fight back, and then continued to psychologically torment my teenage years in that special way only an older sibling can. But our spats, never truly serious, built a foundation for mutual respect as adults, taught us each other’s strengths and weaknesses, gave us insight into each other very few can ever match. Becca is my sister, and yet, on another level, she is me, and I am her.

Excitement buzzes around the nuptials like worker bees returning to the hive, spindly legs covered in potential future sweetness. The stress of months of planning fades, leaving behind a warm, heavy blanket of exhausted joy. My own wedding felt like a drop of water on a hot skillet; beautiful to watch dance and sizzle with frenetic exuberance, but gone much too fast. A few hours on a single day doesn’t seem to do justice to the proverbial ascension into a combined tomorrow, but it’s all we’ve got, so it’s what we do.

A sibling wields a unique kind of love; one born from a nearly identical shared experience. A companion to all those stories lost behind closed suburban doors, a peer like no friend or fiance can be, if only by virtue of the length of the relationship. Not even a very close parent can understand the generational, cultural, and emotional ties that tether brother and sister. Your sibling knows you at your very best and very worst; the haven of your home where you hid your fears and hollered you successes was theirs too, after all.

The wedding will be wonderful. I have no doubts. But a part of me selfishly mourns. A week from tomorrow, the last bastion of the life I knew as a child will be gone.

The house we grew up in was sold years ago, and I can’t bring myself to pull it up on Google Maps, never mind actually drive by it. My cleats have long been hung up as soccer made way for computers and paychecks. My father’s strong hands and voice no longer fill my days with mentoring and humor. All the pieces of youthful vim I cobbled together into the collective tale of my upbringing have melded into the flat pages of the family’s history book, save for my sister, and those tangible, living memories that still swirl around her.

Becca is finally happy, after a long stint of what one could argue was decided unhappiness. Ian’s a good dude, and their future is more than bright. Marriage is what we expect anyway, right? That step that solidifies romantic success, forever friendship, societal acceptance as a lovingly legitimate couple? It’s a major milestone into adulthood, one undertaken by serious adults seriously planning the rest of their lives. Children don’t get married; they shoo it away with cootie-laden ews. To be married is to be mature, or at the very least, brave enough to peek tentatively into the future while holding someone’s hand.

When I walk her down that aisle playing impromptu patriarch, I’m walking us both down an inevitable, unchangeable path. When she says “I, do” the echo will resonate through all our lives, signaling the beginning of an era when we’re all finally free from the fetters of nostalgia, free to appreciate and acknowledge the source while actively moving towards the destination. My dad’s motto was, “never look back,” and now, on the verge of having the freedom to relish in all the possibility wrapped and bundled in each tomorrow, I realize that his words didn’t mean “never remember” but instead “never dwell.”

I mourn, because that’s what you do when you lose something. But the death of one thing often means the birth of another, so my mourning is tempered by the celebration that my sister, the female embodiment of Gray, flowers anew, in a garden of her own tender creation.

A week from tomorrow, my sister will be married.

A week from tomorrow, I can finally let the ghosts of the last thirty years rest, while the spirits of the next sixty come out to play.

oliverbec

Forgotten Friday: First Attempts

January 11, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

In between the blur of beer and video games of my sophomore year of undergrad, I started writing a novel. I thought, in typical 20-year-old fashion, that I had learned enough about life and writing and had the requisite knowledge to write an entire book. I created an elaborate outline and starting clacking away at my little re-furbished Asus with literary abandon.

I thought the premise was brilliant: a young, misanthropic college student records the behavior of the undead (Jane Goodall style) in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. At the climax of the story his hubris leads to him getting bitten and he revisits his diary, making footnotes as he begins to slowly turn into one of the things he’d been hiding from/studying for an entire year.

But very quickly, because of my lack of any focus and real experience, the story degraded into nothing but random scenes and overly visceral descriptions of the reanimated dead. I wrote ~3000 words about the nuance of how flesh falls off of a zombie’s face, for some reason.

Wall of text crits you for 90,000 damage. You die from boredom.

Wall of Text critically hits you for 90,000 damage. You die from boredom.

I got lost in a maze of wanting everything to be the best writing in the history of writing, throwing out stupidly complex vocabulary, piling on unnecessary details, and inserting random asides just because I thought they sounded great. I hadn’t learned any lessons about my own writing, so my voice was weak and dense and boring.

I was drawing from years of exposure to the zombie subculture, but doing very little creating of my own. Everything was a cliche; the way the virus spread, the way the zombies looked, sounded, and moved, my character’s motivations and assumptions about the world.

It had no dialogue. At all. The protagonist was an archetypal asshole. I couldn’t figure out how to transition between chapters, so I just didn’t.

This generic, boring tragedy went on for about 4 months. I stopped writing at about 41,000 words.

Until this morning, I hadn’t looked at that manuscript since the “Last Modified Date” (9/3/2007), because I was afraid of what I’d find. It’s ugly. Repulsive. A perfect collection of unforgivable mistakes and errors that sums up how terrible a writer I was, packed to the margins with my insecurities and collegiate arrogance.

But I refuse to delete it. It is awful and will exist in a perpetual state of editing, but it was my first attempt. My first-born. The first time I really committed to trying something outside of the familiar, the comfortable. This document is milestone zero on my journey to become a writer. To delete it would be a futile attempt to forget where I came from.

Revisiting it now solidifies a lesson that I think a lot of us can take away from NaNoWriMo: Not everything we write is going to be great. Not everything is going to be as clear and coherent as we hoped or expected. Not everything is going to be publishable.

It is great to aim high. I’ll pretty much always suggest that someone aim as high as their imagination allows. Stretching and trying and growing is how you’ll improve, even if you don’t actually reach whatever goal you set.

But at the same time, be realistic. A musician doesn’t expect to write a number one hit every time he picks up his guitar, so don’t expect the Pulitzer for the essay or short story you jotted down after work. Practice and have confidence in your ideas, and you can’t help but improve.

If you pour yourself into your art, eventually the art will pour out of you.

The first big thing you ever write is an act of artistic puberty; an awkward time where you’re forced to experience all kinds of unpleasant things all for the sake of maturing. The acne will clear up. Your hormones will stop raging. Your voice will no longer crack at random, but be strong and consistent and uniquely yours.

As you continue to write, take some time to look back on your earliest work. Open up those NaNo novels in a few months (or even years). It’s amazing to see how far you’ve come, and gives you hope for all those miles you still have to go.

The entire thing reads like this. Pompous would be an understatement.

The entire thing reads like this. I am so sorry everyone.

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