Memo from Corporate:

Greetings employees. As you may or may not know, writing is a genuine passion of mine, and something I look forward to having as a career -dare we say it- someday.

Most of you who have not slept through an English course will know that famous authors such as Mark Twain and Charles Dickens tried their hands at short stories. In fact, in the case of Mark Twain, began their writing career with these short stories.

You can, dear employees, imagine how I felt when I came across this writing contest for 17 Magazine. It is a short story contest. The coincidences here seemed too pronounced to ignore. I have since spent a month or so trying to find a topic on which to compose this [hopefully] soon-to-be-award-winning short story.

To the dismay of many, my subject smacked into me like a loopy pigeon yesterday as I walked to Institute. I constructed most of it in a text message draft as I crossed campus, and finished the rest that evening. The subject matter of this short story is quite unlike anything I've ever written. (Though if you read the previous post, you may be on the right track.)

I beseech you to take the time and assist me to greatness. The steps are easy, as follows:

1. Go to www.figment.com (Sorry if it's not hyperlinked. I still have absolutely no idea how that's done. But as an employee from Corperate, I am not about to openly admit this flaw. Read step 1 again omitting the parenthetical note.)

2. Create a Figment account. (It is very easy, and if you already have a Figment account, please, go on to step 3.)

3. Find my Figment page: http://figment.com/users?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search%5Bname_contains%5D=erica+farnes&x=0&y=0
(If this again fails to be hyperlinked, simply click "people" in the search bar in the upper right hand corner and type my name. I'm the only person who comes up. But it's my full name... So for those who aren't my facebook friends, search under Writings for "What I can't have". I also am the only result for that.)

4. Read my short story "What I Can't Have."

4 1/2. Attempt not to judge me for the subject matter.

5. Click the box that says "heart." (As You can see below I have attached a nice screen shot of what you will be looking at, the important part for step 5 being circled in purple.)



6. Tell all of your friends that won't be offended by my subject matter to follow the steps you just completed.

I hope you noticed, dear employees, that my short story takes approximately 2 minutes to read. That plus the time for the other steps is less than eight minutes, I would wager.

Thank you for your dedication and assistance. And if your assistance is not dedicated, do not fret. You have until January 30th. Congratulate yourself on this good deed. And get back to work or we'll start cutting hours again.

Sincerely,

Erica from Corporate

*to any Figment people that might read this and think I'm breaking the "entrants may not pay people...in exchange for votes" rule: I am not really the boss of these blog followers. I just thought it would be right funny if, instead of pathetically begging them to help me, I made it seem like I was a brute-headed Corperate employee sending another brute-headed Corperate memo.

See how witty I am? You can heart my short story, if you want. The steps are in the memo above.

It takes no time to fall in love, but...

I'll never forget the moment he started meaning something to me: the moment we met. The moment I realized his cute, matured face was the most perfect of its kind. The moment he spoke, the moment he smiled, the confidence with which he held himself. The way I wasn't bothered that he wasn't miraculously toned. His tight pants. His charisma. His eyes.

I could feel how easily we could be something -or more than something. I knew if he would realize it and act, that nothing would keep us from breaking the bonds of solitude and becoming one together. I loved him, coffee cup aside. If ever a girl had such an immediate, over-whelming, all encompassing crush, it surely was secondary to the emotion brewing in me. Surely none loved more than I him.

I will never forget the comfort he instilled with mere eye contact; I'll never forget how his presence infused confidence in myself and allowed me to be true to who I am.

I'll never forget that he loved Jason Mraz, or the way he smiled when I told a room full of harsh eyes that Mraz is my favorite. I'll never forget that he studied at the same performance school as Mraz did for a year. I'll never forget that finally, someone so perfect had such a connection to my heart.

I'll never forget the way the word blazed as I scrolled down his page. Interested in:

Men.

20 Years of Snow

If this was paper the window glass would be rippled, and a waded pile of my mistakes would court the floor.

My ink flask would be nearly empty enough that my quill wouldn't reach, and the candle wick would wait patiently to be lit, as night is drawing fast.

I would push my wood chair back across the wood floor and would walk to the stone hearth.

The fire is dying, I kneel to kindle it, realizing now I'm distanced from the futility of writing that my fingers are stiff and still as boards. I flex them near the fire, shifting my rear to the floor, and forget all but warmth and soft smoke.

If I slept for twenty years would I remember any sorrow? Would the pile of mistakes still lump around?

I look in the corner, where the faded sun still lights on the desk, one final, timid paper peering back.

Would they matter, these crumpled notes of one line or less, would they make all the difference in twenty years?

I suddenly am impressed that in this instant I'm alone enough to have slept for twenty years. I'm as solitary as Rip upon awaking in the woods.

Why did he leave the mountain? Why did he force himself to find existence, to learn his wife was dead, to be heralded by the town?

I come to my feet and pace to the stairway, the room mirroring the place I imagined the black orphan servant girl to labor.

I wish I could go to the elementary school and scan the books until I've come across every novel I ever read in my years imprisoned there. I wish I could find the covers I've never forgotten and refresh the crafted titles.

This isn't paper,the glass isn't rippled,and my mistakes are erased as easily as the wind.

But I still court the lack of ability to write a narrative, a poem, a sentence or two, without sighing and backing it away.

I think I could write better in a solitary cabin, the sun dropping from my rippled window's sight. I'd have to learn better penmanship for the ink to prove well, but the fire would keep my eyes right.

I would write better if I'd slept for twenty years, alone and untethered and free. I'd have trees to walk through and snow to observe. I could live for twenty years with writing.

But I wake up each day in the same place, no mystery men with whom to bowl. I'll never be enchanted or abandoned enough to find solace in more than my mind. Literally, Rip van Winkle is pathetic proposition.

Mentally, I'm sleeping for twenty years now.

Paradox of Seven

I stopped believing. Journey would be so dissapointed. I know I'm not supposed to write off love -that's just a thing Taylor Swift does to make music. But I honestly can't...

I swung my feet up onto the window seat, still wearing my calf-height boots wet from the rain. On a normal day I'd kill myself for risking mud on the soft pink cotton of the window seat cushions; but today I didn't care. They say there're seven stages in crushing on a person: 1) twitter-pated, 2) anger toward person crush is "seeing", 3) anger toward crush, 4) crush never leaves your mind, 5) you claim you're moving on from crush, 6) the time spent between any past stages, and 7) actually moving on.

But what if you moved on not from the crush but from love in general?

My conscience forced me to remove my boots.

No doubt this is part of stage seven, feeling you could never love again. But I'm not certain: this feels deeper, more real. More... empty. It's not absence of reciprocated affection that plagues my mind to muddle out reasoning. It's absence of affection in general: I just don't feel it.

I curled my toes under in a pathetic attempt to keep them warm. Cold seeped past any warmth-providing article and embedded itself in my pores.

I wonder if he intended this,that day he made me stop believing. I wonder if he meant to give me that sexual look of love that belittled me as much as it pierced my heart. I wonder if he meant to make a mockery of seven months.

Seven months.

I pulled my knees to my chest, the cold sticking to every gland regardless of my huddling.

Seven months to love and lose. Seven months to live and learn. Seven months to abolish all faith in the male sex for the rest of a lifetime.

The rain outside is lightening, becoming more confident in returning as vapor to the atmosphere of the clouds.

Or maybe I just need seven more months to fall back into love. Or seven days.

Or seven years.

Or maybe I broke a mirror sometime back, and I must repeat the "crush" cycle of seven a total of seven times before my curse is demolished.

As Much As I Love You, I Can't Control You

As much as I love you, I can't control you.
You'd think I'd be able to by now, but I can't;
Being an actress should at least give me a leg-up.
I don't even know you.
I can't define parts of you when they ask;
I'm ignorant. I play the part. I'm a manipulator.
I put you how I see fit, but I don't understand.
And then you deceive me and cut hearts and confidences,
And I stand in the blood you scourged,
The havoc you reaped, and I blame you for all the wrong.

What right have I? You merely do what you were meant for.
You merely follow your predestined path.
I'm to blame for trying to make you what you're not.
I'm to blame for pulling you out of context.
I'm to blame for never learning of you in the first place.

Anne Frank took pride that she could work with the likes of you.
I applied that to myself.
But I have to gift in this regard.
I have no strength in this purpose.
It's but an easy talent of mistake,
That I regard as talent of success, that puts us where we are.

As much as I love you, I cannot control you.
I am a cannon of rhetoric, fuse constantly ablaze.
I can't blame you for hurting him, and him hurting me.
In the hands of one more skilled all would have been well.
But I am despicable and horrendously flawed.
I swear off this vain word work here and now,
Until the time I learn what you really are,
And how to show love through your parts.

All About the Wordplay

I'll never forget my first conscious experience with a pun.

As a little girl I was babysat by my grandmother every day; this meant I played in the front living room with all her strange toys while the television created noise in the background, and was occasionally checked on and fed.

In those days, and as several stations still insist upon doing, television channels showed re-runs. But they'd pick the same eight episodes to show almost constantly, very rarely airing the others. Needless to say, when it came to the shows I was more partial to, I became rather familiar with these consistent re-runs.

There was one episode of The Powerpuff Girls in which the Mayor was somehow booted from office. He sat on a street curb, perhaps outside of the Town Hall, and he said something that I couldn't ever quite grasp. And much as I would with a Jason Mraz song lyric today, I'd spend the course of the day mulling over that statement. (I think I'd heard his "statement" as a playground song at some point prior in my life; you can ask me to sing it now and I happily will. It never left my immediate memory.) I'd sing the song as I thought about him saying it, but my uneducated mind couldn't grasp the double speak.

At some point the episode was re-aired yet again, and it suddenly all made sense.

The Mayor sat in his rag-tag form on the street corner or whatever it may be, and said glumly, "The old white Mayor just ain't what he used to be."

And then a random white horse stamped its foot merrily in place as it stood in the middle of the road, and Blossom flew down in front of it and began some sort of pep-talk.

I'm not a horse person. No one within arms length of me is a horse person. I didn't know a horse was called a mare, or that such a word would almost be pronounced mayor. It never hit me until that moment that the Mayor was referring to himself on the forefront, but the double speak about the horse and the cameo appearance by said horse were the real joke in the situation. The horse had miffed me as much as the Mayor had, but I'd always taken his phrase as a means to figuring the whole thing out.

And I was right.

And I was so ridiculously proud of myself for getting it. And I firmly believed I was the only little girl in the country to have deciphered that rascally Mayor's riddle.

And maybe I was. Or maybe I wasn't.

I mean, I'd seen the episode enough. Perhaps I was the only little girl in the country that took such a large number of re-runs to find the relevance of the horse.

Whatever the case may be, be my little brain a genius or moron, I've never forgotten that image of the bedraggled Mayor, and I've never forgotten his bewildering sentence.

And this pun has always been my guilty pleasure to drop into conversation whenever it seems relevant. How could I let a cognitive victory like that go to waste?

Change Again

*warning: the following keeps with my over-all general writing style, but I tamper with some less-reputable vocabulary words*

Well, you did it. You got me to believe you. You were so paced and irregular and spontaneous that I had to acknowledge this wasn't some scheme. You were battling with intrigue all the while I was.

And you did it right. You waited, when I thought you'd left, you arranged to meet me at the bus, you smiled....

You gave me your number.

You did it. You got me to believe you. And then you changed. I wasn't expecting you to be smitten immediately. I wasn't expecting you to get on one knee and say "I haven't bought the ring yet, but will you marry me?" I wasn't even expecting a kiss. But I expected a chance.

I was an idiot to think there weren't more like him; I was a moron to assume you'd be different and act as though you cared when you literally cared. I was a brainless imp when I took you for truth. I suffered from flashbacks all evening. I was rushed with the emotions I had back then; I kept my motions under check with the notion that you could -and would- be watching at any moment. I looked when I could for your eyes. Every hat'd head turned into you.

But they never were.

I'd told myself as I left home that this night wasn't about you. I told myself it was for me, and when you happened along all the better.

Well, you happened along and you happened right on by.

Don't expect to get what he got. Don't expect my heart to lay pathetically on the floor, feebly pumping streams of blood into puddles that spell your name. Don't expect me to look at you with the hope that whatever ailed you has passed and you remember you love me.

Don't expect to be waited for.

I've been used before, and months of peril taught me to avoid that road at all costs, should it ever appear again. Damn you for playing nice, for putting on affection and interest. Damn you for channeling him and doing all in your power to be a deuce bag. Loyalty is something wanted for a serious relationship, I thought, not a requirement in all lowly hearts you step on. You did it. You got me to believe you, and you got me to relive in part every horror he inflicted on my heart. You got me to open those wounds. You pushed me back from the thin line of trust on which I stood for men birthed in the last thirty years. You put me back to where he left me: with little faith and hope in soul mates and true love. With the assertion that all men are selfish a**holes, all men will use me for their egos and complacent pleasure. All men will ignore me. No matter how much my heart bleeds for them.

And in spite of all the wrong you did, in spite of all the trust you lost yourself, and all the pleasant, peaceful, patience I posses; in spite of the deceit and hard-eyed shunning, you did one thing he never did.

Apologize.

Granted, you've lost the prestige you held before, but to acknowledge a wrong and care to right it must put me somewhere in your emotional radar. I'm not removing the smudge, because I did that for him for much less chivalrous things and it did me none the good. I'll withdraw a bit, enough to seem as indifferent as you clearly portrayed yourself this evening. But even if you aren't the one, or aren't anything but another name to remember in years to come, you built yourself a new shelf in my heart, casting darkness on the cobwebs that cover his, and as the days go on I'll give you full opportunity to stock your shelf with what you will.

And we'll see if you're like him, or the hybrid with the nads to man up.