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The Witch and the Willow

We aren’t supposed to stare into the sun...

but just this once, I thought I’d like to be reminded what it was like to be dazzled blind.

[adozenprojects-blog]

I need to apologise to myself.

It's been more than a month since I last managed to post. This is the third project I've been working on -- the working title is The Witch and the Willow.

A chance meeting between two failures leads to a an unlikely friendship. Some people just aren't made for life.

[adozenprojects-blog]

It was around three in the morning when she called. There was hardly anyone left in the bar after midnight, so I closed up shop earlier to let the regulars get a few hours’ sleep before their office jobs started later that morning.

 Getting a call this early in the morning was nostalgic, and familiar, like a hit song from years ago that suddenly comes on the radio, and back into your life.

                 “Hello?”

               There was a woman’s breathing on the other side.

                 “…Eri,” I ventured, “…is that you?”

                 She didn’t answer me, but there wasn’t anyone else who’d call at this hour. Even if it had been years since we last saw each other.

                 “It’s been a while. I’m actually glad you called.”

                 I took a deep breath.

                 “Eri, I…I didn’t mean it. What I said back then. We were both tired – everything had been going wrong for us for so long, and it just – it just broke me.”

 “I guess I was right in the end. You didn’t need me at all. I thought that maybe – maybe you’d come running back to me, like the other times we fought. But the last time was different.”

 “What were we even arguing about? It was some drug Dr. Nakamura had you on – Nardil, or Pamelor or something – and you had just – just gotten sick of it all.”

 “I kept pushing you to – to keep taking them. You were better -- you seemed better on them. We could go outside, to restaurants, to a movie – Eri, you’d smile!”

 “God. Eri, you’d smile. It was beautiful.”

“Maybe you were just holding it all in. I…”

                   “I just wanted you to be happy.”

                   I could still hear her breathing over the phone. We had gone back in time.

                 “I…I saw the photos in the newspaper, the other day. Congratulations, really. Your art deserved to win.”

 “I know you never believed me when I said this, but I loved your paintings.”

“I just – I just hated how much they kept you in your own little world.”

 “It was somewhere we couldn’t follow you. No one could. It was like – you left a little bit of yourself in every painting.”

                 I remembered something from the article I read.

 “Ah…I guess that’s not an issue any more is it? Your – your husband…he’s a curator, isn’t he?” I laughed. “I guess you finally found someone who could follow you into your own little world.”

 “Thank…god.” I closed my eyes and smiled. “You found someone who could make you happy. I’m so glad.”

 **********

  I am stuck in the same job, the same apartment – the same everything as three years ago.

 I haven’t stepped forward an inch.

 Back then, I thought I was the only thing holding Eri to this world. When all along, it was me holding her back. When she left…she started moving forward again.

 There’s a moment when you either make it as a partner or you break up because you are a toxin to everyone around you. And on the wrong side of thirty I wasn’t going to be anything anymore.  Get the weed killer; I’m starting to sprout spores.

 Eri – she had all of this talent and skill inside her. And with every passing year we were together she lost a little bit more of it.

 Did I ever tell her I wanted to be an artist, when I was her age?  Of course, I told myself didn’t want to be an artist that much, but with all that wasted time and lack of effort it was inevitable that I would never become an artist any more.

 Watching her try and fail the same way I did was like I had failed at art twice. Maybe that was the real reason I wanted her to quit so desperately. To give her an excuse to quit, make it not her fault.

 One by one I had watched everything I could have been good at fade into nothingness. The only thing I had left was to become a good partner. Anyone who had known me had thought I had gone crazy. I had dedicated myself to Eri. Somewhere along the line I had thought it would make me into a success – if I could just be a good partner.

 “It’s nothing, doctor,” I wouldn’t have to say to her psychiatrist. “Don’t worry about me – just focus on Eri.” I wouldn’t have to say it because people would just see that I’m sacrificing myself for her. I’d be the solid foundation for her life – and in a crazy passing daydream I’d be interviewed – they’d do a story about me in Medical Weekly, about the perfect partner for those suffering from depression.

 But it didn’t go that way. Somehow, I had gotten to the point where I thought I knew her better than anyone else – that Eri’s life was mine. I’d never gotten anywhere with art, with anything. And, I proved beyond a shadow of doubt – that I was as mediocre as a girlfriend as I was at everything else.

 The next morning, I got a phone call telling me Eri had killed herself last night.

      The fairy tale end I wished for never came. But it did end.

   **********

[adozenprojects-blog]

Music is a love of emotion. I want to make a story with music intertwined with the plot. If you’ve watched “All About Lily Chou Chou”, then you understand how music can have such an effect upon the viewer.

In a sense, music can distill the emotions a writer aims to provoke in their audience. I am an amateur in both art and composition -- but no matter what the medium, I am searching for the method of communicating feeling from me, to you.

[adozenprojects-blog]

The second project is called Kingdom. It’s about a jaded mentor rediscovering hidden potential in an unlikely place. 

A far eastern story of a mentor and a girl.

What motivates the Minister? He seems largely unaffected by the things that motivate his peers -- e.g. money, fame, and power, as contrasted with the power plays and machinations of the court of the Emperor. Much of his time is spent frivolously pursuing trinkets and baubles with little regard to their actual value.

Does this make sense?

What I mean to say, is that the Minister is searching for something. To others, he seems little more than an eccentric man with little ambition. He seems to be an old man in a young body.

An old man realises the passions that guided his youth -- the things that consumed him in middle age -- very rarely matter as much as they seemed in the moment.

The Minister isn’t an old man, but he has had an experience that revealed to him how meaningless life can be. The entire world seems fake to him, and as a result, everything he does doesn’t seem to matter at all. This is something that drives mid-life crises -- a desperate search for meaning. People attempt to fill that void with material goods, or superficial experiences. Some simply accept the meaninglessness of their existence.

A driving force behind the Minister’s search is that he is perhaps the greatest swordsman in the world. Yet, he was barely a student from his worldline. Swordsmanship is a relatively new craft (or rediscovered craft) -- weapons with a large metal content like a sword weren’t functional weapons, due to ferromagnetic interference with the magnetosphere, thus they never came into use.

The Minister’s home world, probably Earth, had no such issue.

Whilst the Minister became a proficient swordsman in his own right, he is painfully aware that his is by no means a master of the art. Knowing that others see him as the epitome of swordsmanship is a constant reminder of this.

That’s all for today.

[adozenprojects-blog]

I’m intending to use this blog as a repository for several projects I’ve been working on recently. There isn’t really much content to any of them right now -- they’re mostly vague ideas at this point.

But I’ve found it’s much easier to keep myself productive if I upload my progress to the internet, much in the same way that it’s easier to keep your home clean when there’s an ever constant threat of visitors.

The first project is called Ichiro the Coward and His Miserable Adventures. The title draws inspiration from a Haruki Murakami book. It’s a coming of age story about a coward named Ichiro. I haven’t figured out the details, except for that little nugget of an idea that I’d like to communicate to you. i.e.

How are we supposed to forge meaning to our lives?

There are people constantly telling you what sort of person you should be. Your parents, your partner, your friends, your boss -- do you feel that pressure to conform to some identity? Or do you exert your own identity upon the world? Neither of these are really healthy ways of dealing with the issue, but they seem to be the most common methods of answering that question. Change yourself, or change the world.

Ichiro starts as a young boy. He lives on a strange a volatile island called Okinawa, a crucible of Western and Japanese culture. His story takes us through his childhood, teenage, and finally adult years. The people around him change in that time too.

Here are some sketches of the people that may be around him.

People change over time. Sometimes the friends we have as children drift away, and sometimes the enemies we make in our youth become treasured partners. Who’s to say where we’ll be in the future?