Hello everyone. It’s Sunday here. I had college on every day of the week including Saturday, so naturally I slept 10 hours & that’s where much of my Sunday went. Now it’s a 37°C afternoon. It’s hot, but in a way that just makes me want to roll my eyes at the weather. “Yeah, sure, sure, go ahead, boil us alive. मुझे क्या। It’s whatever.” What else is there?
Well, I have a nice little notepad which I use to write my to-do list for each day. I do take many notes on my phone, particularly for college stuff & for shopping lists, but when it comes to to-do lists? The slight weight of the notepad in my pocket or its presence on my desk makes it much easier to remember, “Yes, I’ve got to do all this stuff. I WANT to do all this stuff!” Much more satisfying to cross off an item when it’s with a pen, too.
Anyway, Sunday’s to-do list includes violin practice, progress on a freelance art job, some college-related readings, and writing. “Which one would be easiest to do first?” I asked, and then I decided, “Writing, because I can do it while sitting on the floor and it’s more fun than the college stuff. The college stuff is fun, but I’ve spent all week on that. I will implode right here if I do not write right now, and then someone will open the door to my room, wondering why there’s been the sound of one song1 looping from my room for 12 hours (usually it’s just 4 hours or so), and then they’ll open the door and see my imploded remains & that won’t be very fun for them & then someone will have to clean it up & it’ll overall be a shitty situation for everyone. Don’t want that!” (slightly exaggerated version of possible events)
So! I had one bit of flash fiction which I had already started writing earlier in the week. I wrote a little bit of that (it’s called NOTHING SWEETER than being dissolved!, look out for it), but I don’t really feel like finishing it today. Vibes aren’t right. I have many incomplete pieces lying around. I also wanted to look at some of my completed pieces, since that might spark inspiration.
Firstly: My folder with the title ‘complete’ has a few pieces which are not complete. One of those is You're Nice But Too Fungal. I wrote 42 words of it in February 2023. I remember what vibe it was supposed to be, something about the narrator (who says, “I am bioluminescent mushrooms”) getting rejected by a love interest for being covered in (or composed of?) a bunch of mushrooms. Which happen to radiate sunlight. Nice concept, I can work with that later.2
But not today, because I’m more interested by an entirely different piece in the ‘complete’ folder. One which is actually complete. It’s from 2021, and it seems I never showed it to anyone. I used a lot of writing techniques I still use now, but in a less refined manner. Analyzing this might give me some insight into how I’ve grown as a writer since then, and perhaps insight into how I can grow further.
Looking at my older stuff actually has a second purpose too: I have an ebook I want to make, a collection of my short works with illustrations. I’ll need to edit some of these pieces, but how? What will be the process? I may figure that out with this.
And! And! And there’s a third purpose too! Triple! It’s simple: I feel like rambling & not shutting up. This is a great way to do that.
Listening. Hearing things.
That is the name of the piece. It’s alright. Vague, seems to be about a sensory experience.
The hallways transform at night. I don’t know what they become, though. It doesn’t matter, because I don’t keep the lights on, I just let the floors do what they want. Let my eyes rest for once in the dark. And just let the walls speak and go on and on and on. I don’t know what they’re saying because it’s all gibberish, like the chattering of a small crowd, the type of thing you’d hear when drowning on your way from a not-home to who-knows-who-cares.
“I don’t know what they become, though.” Clunky. Just be like “I don’t know how, because I don’t keep the lights on”. Go straight to explaining the narrator’s approach to the situation i.e. choosing not to see any of it.
These days, I only use compound words for adjectives. If I used them for nouns, I’d do so sparingly. I don’t like the compound word “who-knows-who-cares” here. Too wordy. See, the narration characterizes the narrator. A bizarre & frenetic person would create wordy hyphenations, because their thoughts would be so fast-paced that it’s necessary to just club all those words together haphazardly. But this narrator is gloomy & has low energy. The brevity still works because he wants to avoid thinking about everything, and wants to end this train of thought (i.e. the first paragraph) quickly. Changing ‘who-knows-who-cares’ to just ‘who-cares’ works better, because it’s less wordy. Wordiness would give it more energy, more freneticism, which doesn’t suit this narrator. This narrator is drowning.
Rest of it seems fine, giving you a sense of the environment & the narrator’s attempts at coping with it.
I’ve got my headphones on. This is no time to hear the whispers of the walls, after all. No time to pay attention to the waves under my feet. I just let the floors do what they want, and what they want is to be waves. So do I. That’s why I force all these sound waves into my ears with these headphones. End of each day, when I’m battered and bruised, it’s just me and my headphones. Pacing around till my right leg gives out. Gives out and drowns in the waves (without me, I think. I don’t know what the floor is really doing with the waves and what type of waves it has and I don’t care.).
“Buddy what the fuck are you talking about” is my usual response when I read my own writing. That’s the intended effect, so that’s fine. This paragraph may prompt the question of, “What does it mean to ‘want to be waves’?” Calling sound as ‘waves’ (because ‘sound waves’) is a bit confusing. Confusion is the intended effect. Whether it’s a GOOD effect is debatable, but I did intend it & achieve it.
The last parentheses is long. I like messing around with parentheses, but I’ve developed a rule of thumb that the parenthetical should not be longer than the main sentence. I’ll change that last bit into: “Pacing around till my right leg gives out and drowns in the waves (without me). I don’t know what the floor is doing with the waves and what type of waves it has. I don’t care, either.”
The parenthetical emphasises the fact that the right leg is drowning without the narrator, while also making the ‘without me’ part ‘sound’ quieter, like it’s being whispered. At least that’s how it ‘sounds’ to me.
I listen to a song, the first one that comes on, and I know that dwelling on your fears and your problems and the fact that the walls and floors CAN and eventually WILL collapse is bad, but I would love for the walls to please know this: I am not dwelling on anything. I swear. Most of these songs aren’t even about walls falling down, or about the floor eating you up. Most of them are just… people being people. And liking it, somehow. Good for them. Good for them.
The first sentence is a run-on sentence because it’s meant to have a tinge of desperation. The part about listening to a song is a separate thought from the whole ‘dwelling ‘ part, though. They’re related, since the songs come up later in the same paragraph, but they’re separate thoughts. The desperation only surfaces after the narrator starts listening to the song. So I’ll just edit it like: “I listen to a song, the first one that comes on. I know that dwelling on your fears and your problems and the fact that . . . [rest is same]“
I listen to a bunch of songs and some of them seem to just pass by, the same way I pass by every little whispering section of the walls. Unnoticed but not really. I hear what they have to say, these people from the past, from other places that may’ve been far far away, or perhaps in the same place I stand, or perhaps in places that don’t exist… I hear what they have to say with their voices, and their words, and their melodies, and the wordless speech of smacking a bunch of keys or strings or whatever. I hear what they have to say and I’m a little less alone in this hallway. I may as well not be in this hallway, really, because I’m real.
I’m real. I’m very very real as I sink into the music. It’s like talking to all of them. They do not know me and maybe they’d consider the entire concept of me, as a person, to be nonsensical. I don’t know these people. I never will. I am talking to them and they are talking to me and we will never know each other, let alone make sense of what we are, but we’re talking.
I know that some of these musicians are dead and that I’m also just a dying man in a wavy hallway. Some of these people may be alive, but the ‘selves’ they froze into these songs are long gone. So yes, I need the walls to know that yes, I know everyone here is dead, but we are all so so real.
No comments for this section, besides one for the first paragraph: What the fuck is “may’ve”? Iconic. I’m not removing that. The narrator does think he’s ‘nonsensical’, so let him turn “may have” into “may’ve”.
“Why does “may’ve” work when the slightly-too-long compound word earlier didn’t?” That was right at the end of the paragraph, prolonging it by just one excessive heartbeat. This word passes you by in the middle of a bunch of head-in-the-clouds pondering.
Anyway, a little more energy being introduced in this passage. Flow works. The rest of it I don’t have that many comments for. Just fixed some minor typos. It seems I got into the zone at this point & so there wasn’t any of the clunkiness seen in the opening. Now I’m realizing that I probably still have this pattern, since the start of each writing session is usually the roughest part, but after that it gets way easier.
I hear every single note. My headphones shove each one into my ears and they might not be good enough to get the absolute deepest notes of that lady’s voice, but I’m drowning so it’s good enough. Good job, headphones. Accomplished quite a lot than I ever will.
Notes and melodies and harmonies and rhythms. Tap my fingers in the air and hear them all roar as I wander around. It’s one of those moments of respite. I get to drown on my terms.
The more I pay attention to each piece of music, the more details I notice. Play a song. Replay it. Repeat it several times. Repeat it. Repeat it. First you pay attention to her words, and then you hear the people singing behind her. There is no one behind me and there’s no one speaking around me outside these headphones and all is safe. The lady is singing and her voice is a nice… oh, I don’t know the words. I can’t use any words. That’s fine though. That’s totally fine. I can hear a lot of things and that is what matters.
There are guitars playing with her. I guess not all the same types, because they all sound like must have… what, different types of strings and wood? Maybe they’re not made of wood. I can’t tell, I don’t see things and I couldn’t even if I tried because light has started to burn my eyes these days and it’s not even day right now, it’s night and the hallway is dark and the guitars and the lady are yelling in another point in space and time. Not here. We are all real but we are not all here. No one’s here! You hear me, walls? No one’s here for you to eavesdrop on. Not even me.
There are strings and they are resonating. The lady’s voice is a sound so there must be resonances there as well, but what is inside a throat that vibrates to make a sound? A larynx?
I let the next song play and there’s more voices, and there’s more instruments, and they’re all percussion and strings. Pitched percussion. A couple unpitched percussion instruments too, because rhythm wants you to know that it can be amazingly complicated. That things, sound waves can move through time. Let them. Let the waves skip and jump like the ones beneath my feet. Voices and harps and marimbas, I hear all of them go and I replay this new song over and over, because I want to pay attention to all the components one by one. Fundamental frequencies of the notes with the overtones dancing around them, making the timbres of each instrument exist and be real (just like us just like us) and the overtones, the harmonics, all of them ask the sounds to sound different even when that fundamental note is the same between all of them. We are real. We are all real.
I don’t know what the voice is saying because they’re singing words I don’t understand (maybe the same words as the walls but don’t think about them), but I can hear all of it. It’s nice. They’ve got good control over their breathing and their emotions and their tongue and their larynx. And what even is a larynx? No, I GENUINELY don’t know, I know that it exists and that it’s in the throat and people just call it a voice box, but what is it? What does it look like? When a vocalist practices, don’t they have to take their screws off their neck to check and see if the vibrations are happening properly? So much to make sure of. So much to check and double-check to see what sounds you’ll be shoving inside a stranger’s head later. So much that I’m hearing right NOW: the fundamental frequencies of every note. All the little overtones.
Some of them are so quiet… so quiet. Every listen though, every listen makes the quieter things get louder. Or no, not LOUDER, but SHARPER. But sharp doesn’t have the meaning I always kneejerk-think it does, does it? No, they usually say “sharp” to mean a sound that has the fundamental frequency, the note a little higher than it “should” be. But of course we are all real and so the notes we hit aren’t always at the exact perfect pitch, and I know this because everything is now “sharp” to me in a way that is known only to me. It’s sharp in the same way that the daggers in my feet are sharp, the daggers in my right leg that make it collapse under itself as the night goes on and as my walk keeps continuing, on and on and on. And the walls speak on and on and on. The floor is sound waves. The floor is sound waves. I am sound waves. The headphones are putting in my head the sound waves. The walls are whispering but they are not sound waves but they’re transmitting sound waves, but they’re not audible to me through my headphones because my headphones are already putting things in to my ears BUT NOW EVERYTHING IS EVEN SHARPER and the ears on my head can catch the whispers again too.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now we’ve transitioned into freneticism. The environment has finally sunk its teeth into the narrator’s psyche. Also, maybe I’ll use the verb “kneejerk-think” again, I like it. Also, “the ears on my head” is a type of description I seem to use often when it comes to a narrator’s body parts. Like the body parts are just separate entities, not truly part of the narrator. It’s great for mindfuckery.3
I hear what makes singer’s voice warm. Little resonances. Little resonances. And so many of them that I wonder if all our graphs of sound waves even do justice to them. People take so many things in life for granted. Power, people, and the overtones of the sounds. Even the fundamentals we take for granted sometimes, because each word that the singers and the walls say through space and time brings with it a new family of vibrations and the little differences in pitch can’t be heard unless your head is as sharp and dagger-filled as mine is right now. I hear sounds through space and time and I hear the recording sessions and the practice and the inspirations that struck all these different people as they came one day to finally make the thing I’m listening to and I’m listening to the influence of the thing I’m listening to on other people, so many voices of so many people and there’s the occasional words that I can make sense of but there’s so so many languages and the world is so vast and I can hear the tiny details of the influence of the music (that it got from others before it was finally made and what it did to others) so now the nuances of the emotions and the minds of the ones who heard these songs and sung along to them, and drummed their fingers on a table to them, and the movement of the air as they bopped their heads along and made sounds that can’t even be noticed at that very same time and place but which I can hear right now AND SO SO SHARPLY, anyone who’s had a single one of these notes touch their ears even slightly for any length of time, what made the music and what the music made, I can hear it all and I can hear everything. I can hear everything.
The floor is sound waves and I’m striding across it. I cannot be stopped. My right leg gives out, collapses.
I’m dancing and I am very real.
The people all singing in my head are real as well and so are the headphones that let me talk to them. We are all very real and we are drowning in the floor.
Let the waves take us, we embrace them with open arms because we’re all real and we’re all talking to each other and the concepts of our selves are nonsensical to each other and even to ourselves, and together we are erasing the scars of not-home to go to who-knows-who-cares, and who knows and who cares about whether we understand each other? We get to drown on our own terms.
Concluding remarks
Nothing’s perfect & nothing ever will be. “Perfect” doesn’t exist.
Writing this post counts as writing, so I can now cross that off the list. I’m happy & satisfied.
This is going in the compilation ebook. The illustrations will be fun! I’ll probably make little animations too, visualize how the narrator stops looking at the bleak surroundings & only feels the music, the waves being the common motif in both cases.
I think something is different in my writing now, but it’s a vague, vibes-based difference that I’m detecting. The vibes of 16 year old me in the pandemic vs 19 year old me being wayyy happier & calmer because things got better. I am not interested in psychonalyzing myself here, though. Do it yourself if you want.
While writing that specific part, it was Blooming Villain from the Persona 5 OST. I only loop songs for ~4 hours when I’m reading, though. While writing, I switch between songs. Though they are looped, and I go for a small selection as compared to when I’m working out or wandering around. So this post’s playlist also includes Psychosocial by Slipknot, Udd Gaye by Ritviz, Castle from the Persona 4 OST, and A Fool or Clown? from the Persona 4 Ultimax OST. So any of those could’ve been playing before I imploded.
The rest of what’s written (besides “I am bioluminescent mushrooms): “Looking from afar: I am radiant, and those around feel the gentle light caressing their cheeks on a cold day. The plants all around photosynthesise with help from my light, flowers coming into bloom all because of me.”
Now that I think about it, the narrator getting rejected for something like this could give off “nice guy” vibes (would be funny if someone interpreted it like that). Did you guys know that ‘incelcore’ is a small genre which, apparently, exists? YouTube recommended me an incelcore song for some reason. But anyway, that vibe is decreased by the next paragraph (which I wrote just now, but you’ll see it later), where the “disgusting” aspect of the fungi is emphasized. And the narrator himself doesn’t see the fungus as just positive & wonderful, since he can see the disgusting aspect too. All-in-all the fungi is shown as a multi-faceted aspect of the narrator’s life, overall just being neutral.
(also, I say ‘himself’ but the narrator could be any gender, it isn’t really indicated in the story & he’s more concerned about the fungi & failed love life than anything; I’m imagining him as a trans man like myself, but I am just one among many intepreters, and thus you can choose whether or not you want to let my interpretation affect your own interpretation. You may find it relevant, you may not. You may want to use that lens, you may not. It’s not a hard science. I’m not writing for the sake of having anything feel certain, I have maths & momento mori for that.)
“Is this an allegory for something in your life?” Is this an allegory for something in YOUR life?
“How did it even get into the ‘complete’ folder?” Probably because I started writing it & thought, “Yeah, I’ll complete it in no time.” It’s the type of concept which I do complete very quickly. I guess I misjudged, though. Early 2023 was entrance exams time, so I made misjudgements like that a lot.
Examples in my other stuff: Larynx, bones, and pheromones & Chit-Chat, Muscle Snaps. It’s more blatant in the second one, since the mindfuck is the entire point.