One Page for 6/1/2019
Somehow, it is June. I thought it’d posted a one-pager in May (AAPI Heritage Month, woo!), but I let things slip again. I’ve frankly been wallowing in a shit period of self-pity about various things in my life, so today I tried to take on an optimistic tone in my scribbles. I’ve reverted back to contemporary realism from fantasy last time, but it’s definitely influenced by the rom-com novels I’ve read within the past year. Sometimes when you’re working through shit, you just gotta let yourself have some cheese.
At the start of the page, I didn’t think I could go on. But I reminded myself that the page isn’t meant to be a final draft; it’s a work-in-progress. Like life.
The words:
Prompt: It quickly became a game: who was going to say the first word, who was going to smile, who was going to pretend to cough, and who was going to make the first move. Jack stared straight at his coffee, stirring and stirring it even though he drank it black. Sammy…
Response: …resisted staring for too long, since there’s that thing where humans, like any other animal, can tell when others have them in their sights. Truthfully though, Jack was. There’s that other thing where people say you’ll just know when you see the other person. Sammy didn’t believe in love at first sight, or at least, she’d learned from enough encounters that alcohol-tinged vision really could grant most people a favorable glow. But Jack. Even a table away in this Starbucks, Sammy could feel possibility again. And that was what she’d needed after, due to some cosmic freak scheduling, attending three weddings in the past six months, either in a friend group or alone. Everyone around her, it seemed, was pushing their lives along, one milestone at a time. She felt she’d settled, lost control or the drive to get off the path she was on. In a job she was adequate at, in a city she could enjoy enough. But Jack. She had seen him here two weekends in a row now. She was nervous. She wasn’t good at this kind of thing, not like her friends who grabbed what they wanted, and got it. But Sammy had to start. This pretending and not living could not continue. “Hey…” she began.
Originally published at J Wang.
