"I knew if I looked back there would be nothing there"

I got a day of PTO, so we took a 3-day weekend at a hotel a few blocks from Old Town, San Diego.  I did not check ahead and had no idea it was Comic-Con weekend until after I booked the room.  As for getting out and doing things, it was a stressful part of town for driving and there was no parking at any of the spots we thought we wanted to walk around.

But the goal of the weekend was to relax.  Good luck there.  My brain is always a waterfall of words and imagery, but I did find enough quiet that I could hear the flow and tap into it.  Like old times, but this time everything came out in top form.  I ended up writing four poems of 3-4 pages each.  Two were for illustrations that a fellow poet sent me as writing prompts -- those works just poured out with the world lore snapping into place as needed.

One was a flash fiction in disguise, about a thing we almost saw under a bridge at the I-5/I-8 interchange.  I was surprised that I choked up at the end when reading it to Anne, but it was a sensitive topic and things went dark quickly.  Then tonight, when I got home and typed it up as a proper flash piece, I had a writing moment that I was quite proud of.  You see, the hand-written piece ended with, "I knew if I looked back there would be nothing there."  Baloney.  I hate that kind of non-ending.  So when I sat at the laptop, I typed, "I looked anyway," and wondered if something had been hiding there all along.  What happened in just four lines was a real vision of horror: nothing commonplace or expected, a strange mix of light and dark, a glimpse beyond the veil that I hope will grip readers if it ever sees print.  The final piece was 480 words.

I have always loved flash fiction.  Sometimes, so much can be packed into a page or two, if your words throw out subtle feelers into the real world and the things we think we already know, and then the story goes off the rails in a different way.

My other piece was about a woman whose life was ruined by tornadoes.  Yes, we saw Twisters on opening weekend, but it wasn't about that at all.  Ever since then, I had a kind of sing-song nonsense in my head which was roughly, "Blah blah blah blah, a twister in her head."  Repeating, with dumb variations.  But I pulled it in, tamed it, gave it form, and again choked up at the end when I tried reading it to Anne.

Good.  If it doesn't affect me emotionally, what are the odds that anyone else will care?

We did get out on Sunday to meetup with a writer friend I had known for 25 years but have not seen much since the divorce (10 years past).  That was the highlight of the weekend. 

On the way home today, we stopped at Balboa Park and walked over to the Japanese Friendship Garden to relax in the restful environment.  More about that later.  But I did write two short poems, and right after Anne got a call that one of her neighbors/friends had died, a haiku about it.  And we made our way home.  Fine weekend, boosted by new writing but tainted by news.