One Lie

There will come a time
Where all the lies you've ever told are just swallowed up and forgotten forever.
And you are forgiven.
But that's not here on Earth.

Here on Earth.
The Earth remembers.

"I didn't tell him I was married." He looks around the bar instead of at me. "He's younger than I am. He's from a different generation. A different time. He wouldn't understand what it was like for me twenty years ago. I couldn't…"

He shakes his head a little, shaking off the memory. Shaking off the disgust. He sips his Chivas Regal. "I got married because I had to."

That's what he tells himself. That's what he tells me.

"So who was this guy?" I'm not looking at my martini. I'm not looking at his reasoning. I'm looking at the place where he cracked.

His voice changes as he speaks his name. His eyes sink as he describes how they met. He taps his finger on his glass as he recounts the language, the moments. His lower lip quivers as he tells me about the best three months of his life.

But the Earth,
The Earth remembers.

"What happened?"

His shoulders drop and he lifts his drink. "He found out I was married." The details of the painful reveal aren't as specific and aren't as important. The punch could have been packed any one of several ways. It doesn't matter. Any way it's delivered, it's still a knock out.

In the end it was the lie, not the fact.

The ring finger on his left hand is bare. He lives in an apartment in Hoboken. His wife lives in a big house in Nyack.

He loosens his tie and he nods to the bartender to bring us another round. "When I met him, suddenly everything mattered. When I lost him, nothing did. I went home and I told my wife. 'Told her everything. We were divorced before Christmas."

He wipes his mouth. He looks at me.

"Too late?"

He sips his fresh drink. He looks around the bar again. His eyes are empty.

But the Earth,
The Earth remembers.



"When I'm old and wise,
Bitter Words mean little to me
Autumn winds will blow right through me.
And someday in the mist of time,
When they ask me if I knew you
I'll smile and say
You were a friend of mine."
-Alan Parsons Project

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Gets It.

" Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. Brick was a good script just to read. It was like, 'Oh my God, these Words feel so good in my mouth.' A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work.
In Brick,
the world is born from the Words."

- Joseph Gordon-Levitt



Joseph, Darlin', you're singing my song.

.

Ampersand

"But this really happened." He looks at me, unsure. "This is about Patricia. This happened. I was there."

"I know." I nod. What's your point.

He pulls his glasses off and studies me. He gets a good look. "Why are you calling it fiction?"

Fiction is safer. Fiction is distance. Fiction lets you tell yourself it didn't happen quite like that. It wasn't me. Not quite that badly. Not that much. Not that huge. Fiction helps you sleep at night. I shrug. "It's not Word for Word the way it happened."

He raises his eyebrows and gives a half nod. "But still. You changed a couple of incidentals. But this would hold up as non-fiction to any scrutiny. This happened."

No one is welcomed to scrutinize my life. I'm in no way interested to prove anything to anyone. Fiction prevents scrutiny. Fiction prevents skepticism. Fiction prevents accusations. And exposures. And betrayals. And permission. "It's fine as fiction."

"Doesn't non fiction sell better? Don't people strive for non fiction?" He hands me back the folder.

I can't speak for The People. I was never their leader. Maybe they do strive for true crime or memoir. Maybe they prefer to read the dirt they call truth. I take the folder from him and slide it into my black Kenneth Cole messenger bag. "I don't know." And I don't care. I write what I want to, how I want to. If someone wants to point at this and say that never happened, fine. Let them. It didn't. Fiction makes it so.

He puts his glasses back on and refocuses. "Veronica, you're playing a game. Pretending. Calling this fiction. This isn't fucking fiction. It happened. I know Patricia. Maybe you changed, what..." He waves his hand at my messenger bag. "The, the... time frame, or the other woman. The song in the background maybe. But this happened. This really happened."

"It's fiction!" My voice is louder than I had wanted. It startles both of us. I try to drop back down. "I'll always admit it's inspired by real events. It came from some where. But it's fiction."

He raises his hands a little in a surrendering motion.

I look at his eyes. At his hand sliding into his pocket. I look at his shoulders. "Why do you want this to be non-fiction? Why does this matter to you?"

"Because I'm a journalist. I see the world in facts."

And,
That is the difference.
"I'm not. I don't. I'm a writer. I see the world in Words." It doesn't matter to me if the date is right. It doesn't matter to me if four people said it over time, or if one person states it concisely. It doesn't matter if it's really Rainbow or Led Zeppelin.
All that matters to me, is the Words.
And making my world safe to write them however they truly want to flow.
Not hindered by fact or timeline, not restricted by scrutiny or judgment.

His shoulders sink a little. I can see the drop.

"Why does that bother you so much?" I squint as if getting a tighter view will show me.

He runs his hand over his chest. "Because I just realized something about myself. When I argue that the facts are more important than the Words, I am proving to myself that I am not a writer."

And,

What About Bob?

I really liked this, and I want everybody to read it.

From the Soundtrack of My Life

I see it now
Become so clear
Your insincerity
And me, all starry-eyed
You'd think that I would have known by now.
-Asia

You have taken it all
All of my love
Unrelenting you told
You told me a lie
So I can cry
There aren't Words for it all.
-Zebra

Searching
You stop to listen
Not a sound.
Start to worry.
Maybe if you'd been around.
-Xenon

Ain't life funny?
-Streettalk

For One Whom God Let

“You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.”
-Kurt Vonnegut

Ghost in the Machine

"This is unbelievable. Look at this." He turns the computer screen so the ghosts can see.

We're sitting around his desk; the ghosts. And we all lean up to look. We're all there for different work. Each of us, a ghost. Each of us.

The editor had been distracted throughout the meeting, clicking around his keyboard. I do that too. Check email, read several newpapers and logs at once.

It was a common meeting. The editor and the ghosts. Until he couldn't keep this from us any longer. Until he turned the screen. Until we saw.

There is nothing worse than an ignorant person, judging.

It seems an ad was listed online for a ghost writer. A decent payscale offered for a no credentials required effort. It's a good ad, describing exactly what a good ghost does. It is nothing short of perfectly normal. It is exactly what this ghost wants.

However, the ad is lampooned by some simpleminded single-viewed self-titled "journalism" blog. The blogger goes off on the ad's owner, saying it was unethical. Saying what an awful kind of a person tries to buy a writers work and credit it to themselves.

It goes on to describe the plight of struggling writers, none of whom could possibly want anonimity, and concludes with icing declaration of ignorance on the cake: the blogger will now have to *think* about the commonality of such a blasphemous occurance as ghost writing.

The room bursts into laughter. The editor, and the ghosts. The ghost to my left, and the ghost to my right.

At first I feel sorry for anyone that clueless. It's like breaking the truth about Santa and Professional Wrestling to a child.

But the more I think about it, the angrier I get. It's one thing not to know anything about a given industry. But it's entirely another to judge it.

"What an idiot," the ghost to the left of me is shaking his head, still laughing. He has an entirely different reason for cherishing his anonimity, and choosing to ghost, than I do. Every one of us has a different reason. Every ghost.

And how dare this asshole judge.

I'm not laughing. "I'm fuckin' pissed."

"Really. Who the fuck does this asswipe think she is?" Now it's the ghost to my right. But through laughter.

I have to ask, "Why do you think it's a woman?" I'm still not laughing. I'm the ghost in the middle, not laughing.

The editor has already turned the screen back and gone onto something else. He's handing me a check as he says to Right Ghost, "Please don't answer her in my office. I just got this rug from Pottery Barn."

The right ghost grins at me. "It just felt like a woman."

I walk around to the editor's chair and try to look at the computer. "It felt like a woman?? It sounded like a 12 year old."

The editor is taking a folder from the left ghost as he says, "Sit down, Veronica, I closed the screen."

I'm thinking about the nerve it takes to assume you can speak for all writers everywhere. I'm thinking about sociopaths that project what they want on every body else. "Email me that god damned link."

"Why?" The Left Ghost pats me on the head as I sit. Left Ghost and Right Ghost have been doing this longer than I have. I'm doing it almost 20 years. Ghosting. "It's only going to upset you."

"How dare that bitch judge me. I have as much a right to want to ghost, as she does to want to sign her name."

"Well at least we agree it's a girl." The editor looks at me over his glasses. "Granted, a 12 year old girl that lives under a rock."

An hour later the meeting is over and I am in the elevator with Right Ghost. He's showing me pictures of his grandchildren. He says the little one just turned three, and has discovered the fishtank.

"How is it that you're not upset over that idiot blog?" I'm still fuming.

He smiles and calmly says, "Veronica, if I let every idiot upset me, I wouldn't have any time to spend getting Cheerios and army men out of fishtanks."



"I do believe in ghosts!
I do believe in ghosts!"
-The Cowardly Lion
-The Wizard of Oz

Vacuum

I regret the friendships that weren't,
That I invested time and energy into, that were lost. Wasted.
I regret having spent myself on people that turned out to be bullshit.

I regret not having done the same for certain people.
Friends
That I didn't recognize,
That I let get away.

When my father died, a someone told me:
Now is when you will know who your real friends are.

No greater statement has ever been uttered.

And not just of the day.
But after.
It was a skill I acquired during that time
That I kept.
How to recognize those defining moments.
How to really see people.

The people that faded...
The people that didn't...

The learning.
The loss.
The lesson of the ever fading.

Comperlative

Of sky and earth.

That feeling, of being where you're not really supposed to be. Seeing the world from the outside.
Hearing the whispers of the earth.

The middle of the night, pulled off on the side of the highway, outside of the car, feeling the size of the world, and the vibrations of the traffic as each car passes by.

Coming out of an airport at dawn. 6am, in a new city, a place you've never been before, where everything is fresh and possible. And awakened.

Sunsets on oceans.
The most spectacular points of sky and earth,
touching.
As if god whispers, "Look. Look at this. This is what I intended."

Seeing the depth to which somebody can love you.
Sometimes somebody can love you with such subtleness, and such power, that it takes you by surprise.
And all the places of earth and sky reveal.

And then you make yourself vulnerable. More vulnerable than you already are. The most vulnerable any one can be.
The moment where it all changes. And it isn't about you any more.
You take that final step, and push.
And there you are.
On the side of the road in the night sky.
In a new city at dawn,
At the water's edge when day is done.