Caught up on sleep. Ready to get 10,000 words written today!
Narrator: She’ll probably do a neat 2k, if she stays off the YouTubes.
The sky is solid gray–not fog, but a low ceiling as my pilot parents used to say.
Rocky the cat slept at my feet all night. I’m pretty sure he resents having to look after me while his brother from another species, my husband, is on walkabout. As soon as I woke up, Rocky shot out the kitty door to mole hunt. At least, I hope he’s mole hunting and not looking for the third leg of our domestic stool. Bakersfield and then San Diego are too far for his little paws.
In the days before my husband left, I lowkey couldn’t wait for hims to go. The love of my life, the light of my eyes, the star in my sky, but FFS get on with it! Go!
Narrator: She hates how “lowkey” has crept into her vocabulary. She knows the phrase “high key light” and “low key light” from her days obsessing over film and especially film noir. The kids use “low key” from music, not film, but every time she hears it or says it, she thinks “why are you casting yourself in a literal villainous light?” She thinks too much.
Now he’s gone and the silence frets my heart with grief, as if he isn’t coming back. He always comes back. I am his home.
Why can’t a person ever be satisfied?
Old Mysti, beforetimes Mysti, wildly unwise Mysti would project her panicky grief-fretted anxiety onto the poor man, and pick fights with him over the phone. As we grew wiser, as I grew more aware of my own flaws and focused less on his, the fights diminished in frequency and intensity, but he still braces for a storm, not quite trusting that the old Mysti won’t fight her way back to the phone.
Now I see why people tend to stay stuck, to repeat patterns instead of growing out of them. The shame of recognizing fault hurts so much. But hurting someone you love is even worse.
All this pointless melancholy will fade once I start writing. I’m pouring a lot of these feelings into a fictional version of the short, life-changing interlude from my real-life grandmother’s life in Hilo, Hawaii. It’s taking me forever to write, partly because turning the tragedy that shaped my mother’s whole life into a drama for public consumption has had many false starts and dead-end paths. But also, the responsibility for presenting glimpses into the many stories of Hawaii that aren’t really my story to tell, but aren’t really not my story to tell either, has left me second-guessing everything.
My favorite screenwriting instructor Neil Landau said, “it’s fiction, you can fix it.” With this book, that lesson has taken a while to sink in. I’ll do right by my mother and grandmother, and the people of Hawaii. But only if I get the bones of this thing on the page.
Stay safe, and don’t forget, all them fascists bound to lose.
Tangent: One of my favorite parts of the BBC Sherlock series is the way they show the progression from suspicion to trust to love, and how hard forgiveness can be, even for the deepest love. I also have an actor’s crush on the way Martin Freeman has Watson walk: he’s as expressive with his posture and gait as Cumberbatch or Scott are with their pauses and phrasings and gestures. The filmmakers exploited his incredibly expressive whole-body choices throughout the show. Can you imagine finding dramatic territory to carve out between Scott and Cumberbatch? Brilliant.
