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Thread: "What is the Matter?"

  1. #1
    Registered Punk Behemoth702's Avatar
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    "What is the Matter?"

    The mirror like myself holds a fogginess that clouds the whole of its superficial purview. Slowly does the mirror’s reflective surface clear, leaving only the clean properties of its smooth virgin surface. Splashing my face briefly, my eyes begin refocusing themselves before the dull set held in the lifeless gaze of the mirror. I needed saving direly. I am swimming in uncontrollable thought, not a word nor picture becoming too distinct for too long, swirling about in an endless motion, crashing and disintegrating. A word comes to thought, associating freely, gathering momentum, growing expansively, recklessly, until slamming directly into the abutment of the next conceptualizing word or image flash. I am overwrought, the process is sickening to me, I double up in pain. A pain whose form begins to take on the characteristics of a tide; a tide of yellowish-tinged acid breaking in waves against the perpetual hollowness of my stomach.

    Taking up a towel in hand I removed myself from the bathroom, walking into the sedate light of the bedroom gently dabbing the remaining moisture off my face. The bedroom sits like many apartment dwellings of this period, a drab four corners painted eggshell white closely situated together. She lies there on the bed, her head in the crook of her left arm staring, employing her interest completely before the behemoth, her eyes awash in the rainbow hues, her ears jammed with mundane banalities. She wears not a look of concern, nor of need, and certainly not of joy. Her face sits as many faces of the day have sat, commonplace; naive; her mouth agape.

    She is yet another empty wordless window tragically, no, woefully falling into the dark dank abyss of the destructive self, unwilling to seek out life to boldly experience. So there atop the bed, lying on her side just above the duvet, but snugly hidden underneath a hand quilted coverlet, a small somewhat decorous pair of legs, restlessly against nature lie muted in motion. Tracing the line of her leg, as it contemptuously rises to the thigh in an aquiline fixture adjoined to the hip, and from the hip to the waist. An absolute grandeur to take in from opposing human lens with a fixated mindset adept in minutest details apropos of feminine qualities.

    “What is the matter?" I ask myself. Foolishly I begin to believe that I can grasp the meaning of life, at least in its modern contextualization, feeling at one with the social emptiness, the paradoxical isolation, and cynical fatalism of the times. Well I surmise that in the core of the self, it certainly is fatal. The matter however, is much simpler, although animal, yet still very human in nature, I was yearning only for what a man of my age wants of his young wife, to f**k. In vain attempts, from coy to crass, I however, in my abilities cannot wrest her from the machinations of her trance. "Selfish? Yes, but guilt inducing, why does it have to be." I ponder. Heavily the thoughts press down upon me from above, and push physically, outwardly against me from below; I roll over and close my eyes on another waste of an evening, and day in my life that I will not be able to grab a hold of again, and so it fades, slowly at first, and suddenly all at once.

  2. #2
    Dryer
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    I notice that you switch between past and present tense a few times. There are also a few run-on sentences, and I feel like the reader needs to know more about the circumstances of each character.

  3. #3
    Registered User Steven Hunley's Avatar
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    response to story

    I labeled this 'reponse to story" but alas, I can find no story here. There is a setting, and some confusing wording, great gobs of pretentious vocabulary, but for what reason?

    As an example:

    As I am overwrought, the process is sickening to me, I double up in pain. A pain whose form begins to take on the characteristics of a tide; a tide of yellowish-tinged acid breaking in waves against the perpetual hollowness of my stomach.

    You could have said, " I have ulcers."

    Instead of:

    She lies there on the bed, her head in the crook of her left arm staring, employing her interest completely before the behemoth, her eyes awash in the rainbow hues, her ears jammed with mundane banalities.

    So where's the behemoth? Is there a whale in the nearby aquarium? And her eyes, is she crying, is that why they're 'awash'? And mundane banalites, is this because she's listening to him? Is that why she's crying? Because if that's why, tell her to scoot over and give me a corner of the blanket, I'm about to cry too.

    You can have a great story and tell it badly and have a loser, or you can have a loser of a story, and no matter how well you write it, trying to prop it up with endless strings of words, and end up with a loser anyway.

    Reduce the uneeded verbage, give us a story, and simplify, simplify, and whatever you do, don't try to prop up a non-existant story with nonsense phrases like:

    An absolute grandeur to take in from opposing human lens with a fixated mindset adept in minutest details apropos of feminine qualities.

    Uh-oh, my mouth is agape! Agape I tell ya, agape, because when it comes to writing like this I have to ask myself, WHAT IS THE MATTER?

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