Swim Back to Me

I've been day-dreaming about my manuscript, Swim Back to Me again.

Yeah, yeah, I know, Ann Packer stole my title -- believe me, you, I had it first. (Sh)it happens. There are only so many titles in the world.

Anyway, the manuscript's been at the top of my mind these days. I'm itching to work on it again. I'm poking some irons in the fire.

I mean, I love my YA writing and my YA books, but there's something about my women's fiction  that speaks to me where I live, that reflects all the raw, often-bottled, and once-in-a- while-unleashed angst of being a woman, wife, mother in this day and age.

There's just something so damned cathartic about taking my real feelings, and the small, mundane events in my life, and blowing them up and out of the water (if you will), to leave them heaving and bleeding on the page.

There's something about the mood of my women's fiction that fills me, that I just don't get from my YA.

Take this bit I was reminded of today because of this photograph I came across from the beach where I swim . . .

     John lowers himself onto me and we kiss, as around us the yard hums and above me the clouds drift by in stretched wisps across a perfect cornflower blue. Everything is sharp-edged yet floating, as if I have fallen into a Magritte painting and might reach up to find my own features gone, replaced beneath a black bowler hat by clear sky and clouds passing through.
 

    This here, this is not me.  

 

     N’est pas une pipe.   

     I let my eyes wander, follow sky, and breathe him in like air.  He lifts my shirt, and slips his hand in, and as he kisses me, his fingers find my breasts.  He moans and grinds his pelvis against mine, and the ground swirls and disappears. 

 

           Where am I?  How did I get here?  Who took my old life away? 

∞ ∞ ∞

From Swim Back to Me.

- gae

 

 

Fucking Peter Gabriel

er, that's not how it sounded, but I wish.
okay, no I don't. Jon Hamm, maybe. Or these days, Adam Levine. But anyway.

I blame Peter Gabriel for my angst this morning. Like a Pavlovian trigger, In Your Eyes, took less than two minutes to take a sunny day and turn it angsty. Or maybe I've been hovering there all week. It's the whole end of summer/time flying thing. There are days I can't take it. There are meds for that, I know. Maybe I could use some.

Trust me on this: It's hard to get older. To see the days flashing by. To watch your face and body change no matter what you try to do to hold it suspended in your youth. Life is hard. Then you die. Someone famous once said.

And, I'm not fishing for compliments. I know I look pretty good for 47. Still, it aint no 25. Thanks anyway, though.

I sound gloomy, I know. Apologies. It's that fucking Peter Gabriel song that gets me every time.

I've had two unrequited "loves" in my lifetime. It's amazing how those stick with you no matter how many years pass. In both cases, the boys (men, whatever they were) pursued me, then dropped me without warning, and without a willingness to remain friendly or ever basically speak to me again. When I think of either of those people, it still hurts -- or worse, brings me back to this intense place of longing. Is there anything more angsty than longing?

A few years ago I read (in the New York Times) about a study that demonstrated that, when we remember something painful, it triggers a chemical or a spot (forgive me on the technical details) in our brains that actually momentarily behaves as if we are reliving the pain at that moment. Ah, then there's a science behind it. This makes me feel less crazy.

At any rate, Peter Gabriel just brings me back there. And so he did this morning. Luckily, there's water in my back yard and a bathing suit right over there.

- gae