The Lovesong Writer

It is amazing how tired one can get by simply doing nothing for two hours. I sat in that dull geometry room reading posters of lines and angles, listening to the sniffling of stuffy noses. S sat next to me as usual; it was the same thing last year. I wonder if S and I look related at all. Our names are so similar that we both look up at the same time during roll call.

The writing prompt was insanely ridiculous. Write a narrative describing your encounter with an object, building, etc. that demonstrates character. I should have written about the classic No. 2 pencil in my hand or the lovely test booklet with the easily erasible green ink cover. Instead, I wrote about a nonexistent willow tree perched by the banks of a nonexistent river. Writers are liars. I aim to please, and teachers are suckers for weepy melodramatic environmental moral stories.

Halfway into the essay (mine's resembled a vignette more than an essay), I decided my narrative was getting to happy-go-lucky for my taste. "Strands of green leaves graze the river's edge as if the willow was lowering her head to taste the water" and "hopeful hearts and lovers' initials etched in her bark" just aren't morbid enough for this hopeless tragic. (Is tragic the right word? What's the opposite of "hopeless romantic"?)

So I ended the story with the whirring of chainsaws and the clearing of land for a new "Riverside Apartment Complex."

Very cute, I know.

I'll also mention that the proctor initally forbade any writing after the answer sheet was turned over. Like a good girl, I obeyed for about an hour. Bored out of mind, and being the idiot who forgot her ipod at home, I wrote another tragic vignette as usual.


The lovesong writer sings of colors, crimson passion green envy blue drowning black mourning, rejected by girls worth his time and adored by girls too cheap to fuck. In the Heartbreak Hotel he stays, a refugee playing chords and arpeggios on heartstrings.

They fawn over him, worship him, sacrifice pieces of their own beating hearts for this earthen god. His songs are about the One Who Got Away. Who is she, they ask but each time he responds with the same masked smile. No one knows who turned down a god, made him fall from his heavenly throne like a falling star, burning from his own heat and passion until he made impact with the earth. Just another immobile stone heart.

And in the ashes, the lovesong writer sings.