Hey guys, guess what?
I invented a game.
It's fun and you should play it. It's really easy, too. All you need to play it are two writers with cellphones and paper and pens, or laptops or whatever floats your boat, I guess. Like if you wanted to use papyrus, power to you (freak).
Anyway, the writers can't be in the same place. It would be cool if they weren't the same city. It would be even cooler if they weren't the same country. If they could be on different planets, actually, that would be perfect. But that might be asking for a bit much.
So.
Each of the writers looks around them and picks something from their immediate environment. A hat. A person. Graffiti. A pile of trash. The color of the sky. You get the idea. Then they use that thing as an inspiration to write a sentence or a question or anything, really. They txt what they write to the other person. Keep it short. Keep it simple. Keep it rad. Next, the writers use the sentence/question/whatever they received as a prompt for a free-write. Fifteen, twenty, minutes, or shorter, or longer, whatever the writers are feeling. When they're done, they can send each other what they wrote. They can even go on to continue one another's pieces, if they so desire.
There. Boom. Metaphorical space travel through writing. The secret connected nature of all things. A war against wanderlust and writer's block. Try it. I dare you.
Okay, fine. Only seems fair that I share with you how my first attempt at playing The Game went. Below is the piece that I wrote. My friend Sarah Neilson, who lives in Chicago, gave me the sentence: "I wonder what I should put in this box?" The time limit we set was fifteen minutes. Here ya go:
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I wonder what I should put in this box
Negative space: the triangle between her elbow and her waist. The small vase-shaped gap between her thighs and the cleft of her vulva. She is standing knees together hands on her hips. Naked like that. The thing is, she's strong. You always see naked women made to look weak, like intrinsic in exposure is vulnerability. But that's wrong. She's stronger than I've ever seen her, stronger than standing at the front of the room in a power suit giving orders.
Negative space: the ellipses between what you think and what you say. The space between desire and fulfillment.
Or, this. Negative space: the place between her legs that I push my fingers into. How the deeper I press, the more there is to press into. It's like the fucking universe, constantly expanding and all that.
Negative space: dark matter.
Negative space: what you fall into when you fall in love. What catches you. Incorporeal hands on your insufficient heart.
Negative space: a box, just a cardboard one, open in the corner of her room, and empty. And I have my mouth on her now, and my fingers pressing to the weird tender skin on the back if her knees and I know I should close my eyes because let's face it, everyone likes it better that way. Or at least if I could look at her face. But I can't stop looking at that box. I imagine something growing in it. A baby or a squash or a culture of bacteria, or just a feeling, a feeling that will swell to take over the world. A revolution being born.
And then it hits me.
The box, I saw her open it. I know what is inside. And that means...
Oh fuck.
I pull back abruptly, just as I start to feel a shudder go through her spine like the impossible ripple of a Jacob's ladder. She touches my head and says, "James?" When I don't answer: "Is something wrong?"
Negative Space. What you see when, just for a second, you let your eyes slip out of focus and the whole world reverses itself.
Not a revolution after all. But: revelation.
