What I do isn't really writing

Tuesday 11/25/25

I don't look at it as writing because I see what everyone else writes, and how they write, and I see what writers throughout history have done, and what they did and do isn't what I do. What I do is a different thing. It's something else. And there isn't anything else similar to this thing I do. I've been working on "Dead Thomas" this morning. It's getting close. Got 1000 words shorter so far today--down to 6500 words. We'll do some prose offs later. You think what I've said is implausible? Okay. This is from the story, which is told by a girl or a woman--it could be either, depending on when she's telling the story, and you can't tell, which is intentional, of course--named Bonita.

“’Sup,” Thomas would say when we passed each other in the hall, which I gathered is not how people from the 1940s spoke, but you adopt the parlance of those around you. That’s how accents happen and it’s no different with the dead and the living, which are actually confusing terms that happen to get used like everyone knows exactly what they mean.

They say that no matter what situation you’re in, no matter how hard, you’ll eventually act like you did before the new situation started. Show the regular signs of life. Which doesn’t mean totally. But your pain won’t carry though every word that you say. You won’t walk around crying. People in jail smile and laugh. Even people in worse things, like concentration camps.

I saw a picture in history class. Two girls at a fence on a winter day you could tell was colder than cold. Their fingers poking through the holes. The only parts of them that were ever going to get out even for a moment. I know, because on the next page you learned what happened to them. Each girl had on a single torn mitten. They must have had only two between them so they shared. A mitten for you, a mitten for me. And there they were, laughing.

I wonder if Thomas felt the same way. He became one more boy with the taking of each test or the latest reminder from Ms. Kathleen that Shakespeare was funny whether we knew it or not, groundlings that we were, except he was the boy that people said made you think.

They didn’t say about what. I thought about where something ends and something else starts. Lives, loves. The unholy, holy why-ness of it all. The officially unofficial dividing lines.

It’s like when a year gets off to a rocky start because a bunch of bad events happened in the first week and someone says, “It’s going to be a hell of a year,” as though it’s a continuous package. Except a new year starts every day. And ends every day. Today is the day that a thousand years came to a close and another thousand years got started. Yesterday could have said the same. Just like tomorrow. It isn't where things start, but where you’re counting from. If that’s what you want to be doing.

That's something else.