This is going to be the last piece of crap I post on this blog for a while. I don’t want to post anymore op ed pieces spouting my opinion on stuff. I don’t want to post anymore shitty fragments of garbage. I have to get my head back on straight and write good erotic fiction. Since it seems I can’t do that at present, I’m going to stay quiet until I can. Either I write something I can be proud of, or nothing at all. So… I’ll leave you with a parable.
Once upon a time there was a woman who loved words. Not only was she in love with them, but they loved her in return. She kissed them and stroked them, fed and nurtured them. She held them in her cupped palms and pressed them to her breasts. She let them crawl over her body and lay eggs in the crevices of her soul.
She built houses, towns, cities and whole worlds with words. And then she populated them with people woven from them too. She created tastes, touches, breezes, scents, and even made a sun of words to warm the world she’d made. Jungles grew in the wake of her dancing fingers as they skittered over the letters of her keyboard. Mountains rose up, clouds formed. People were born, grew, loved and died, only to be reborn again with new names and new faces.
She looked at what she’d made, and she saw that it was good. So good in fact, that it was far, far preferable to the real thing.ย In the word world, the air was warmer, the oranges brighter and sweeter, the lovers more interesting and the orgasms more earth shattering. Year by year, she spent more time in the word world and less in the real one. Her own world got bigger and bigger and the inhabitants grew in number. It was so much more pleasant and easier to live in it.
One day, the woman fell in love. Not with one of the people she’d made in the word world – she’d done that many times – but with a real person.ย She fell in love because he was so much like the characters she tried to create. She thought that, if she could have made the perfect word lover, it would have been him. He was so much smarter, complex and stranger than anyone she’d ever met or made. It was impossible for her not to fall in love with him and so she did.
In falling in love, the woman began, day by day, to dwell in the real world a little more, because that was where her lover lived. And the real world seemed, somehow, a better, more interesting place than she had remembered it to be. Perhaps, she reasoned, it was because he was in it.
The world she’d created of words seemed less and less important. Its landscape faded, its sun did not shine quite as brightly. The people who lived in it seemed like cardboard cut-outs.
Believing that things that are not freely offered are of inferior value, the woman never asked her lover for anything. When he offered her things, she would refuse them, wanting him to understand that she loved him for himself and not for what he might give to her. But, one day, after expressions of mutual affection, she got up the courage to ask for something she really wanted.
“Will you give me one thing?”
“It depends what it is.”
“I want a word. Just one word.”
“Which word do you want?”
“It doesn’t matter. Any word will do. I just want you to say it to me. One word.”
Her lover laughed. “It might not be a very nice word.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated. “Just one word, from you.”
“Alright,” he said. “I’ll have to think about which one.”
“Take your time,” the woman said, not wanting to press him.
Weeks went by, and the woman waited patiently for the word. But none came. After a few months, she screwed up her courage again and asked. “Hey, where is the word you said you’d give me?”
“Oh, I’d forgotten,” he replied. “I’ll get it to you.”
More months went by and all this time the woman waited for the word.ย Each day she thought, ‘Today might be the day he gives me the word.’ But as time went on, it became clear that no word was forthcoming.
“Why haven’t you given me the word?” she inquired one day.รย For she was sure there must be some reason for his hesitation.
Again he laughed. “Oh, yes. The word. I’d simply forgotten it again. I remembered a while ago, but then I didn’t know how to deliver it to you, so I let it go. And then I forgot. I’m just forgetful about some things.”
The woman was hurt. She wanted to believe that there was some hurdle, some barrier, some mistrust that stopped him from giving her the word. They had a fight and she demanded to know the real reason for his refusal. Being a person who built worlds out of words and wove great and dramatic complications, it suited her pride more to believe that there must be some mysterious cause underlying his refusal.
But in the end she tearfully acknowledged that, no, it was exactly as he said. He’d simply forgotten.รย He’d forgotten the word. Forgotten her desire for it. Forgotten its importance to her. And her.
At first, everything went on as it had before. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, the woman began to shrink.รย At first it was hardly noticeable. She woke up to the real world, and it just felt a little bigger than she remembered it. Buildings began to tower over her, her dresses seemed too loose. Either everything was getting bigger, or she was getting smaller. The woman knew which one it was. And, although she still adored her lover, she was becoming a smaller thing to love.
In despair, the woman, now barely able to find her way through the monstrously large real world, turned inward, to the world she’d once built out of words. But so much time had passed, and she had neglected it so cruelly, it had turned to desert. The countries, and cities and buildings had all crumbled away. The air smelled stale and dusty, every colour was bleached to sickening shade of beige, and all the beautiful, complex people she had created seemed to have died or left, for the word world was utterly empty. She stood in the centre of what had once been a lush and regal boulevard and watched the wind play with sentence fragments and make dust devils out of all the words she had so lovingly crafted the world with.
“I should have never left you,” the woman cried. But no one and nothing answered. Even the wind had no whisper.
She fell to her knees and wept. And in her bitterness, she reminded herself that she had always known better: things not given freely are never worth having.ย But the woman, in her greed, had been willing to trade an entire universe for just one word. Now she had none left.
People who do that sort of thing deserve to live in a desert, and so she did.
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