NaNoWriMo Excerpt (original) (raw)

“Do you remember that time I visited you, and I couldn’t fall asleep even though I was exhausted from driving for 12 hours?”

Silence. A small huff of breath, a light laugh or possibly a sigh, heard across 1,000 miles of telephone wire. “Yes.” Yes, yes of course you remember. At five o’clock in the morning, with the sun peering over the horizon, you sat on the couch and watched a Spanish film; you can’t remember the name of it. You can remember the way his little finger felt when he accidentally brushed it against your hand, and the jolt of electricity it sent through you, the way your heart skipped a beat like you were a naïve 15-year-old with his crush.

You remember how you turned to glance at him and caught him looking, and how he snapped his eyes back to the television, a small smile tugging up one corner of his lips. You remember how he set his shoulders as if he’d reached an important conclusion, and then suddenly his hand held yours, and your entire body was tingling with electricity and you felt like you could power New York City with the energy in you.

You remember how the next time you caught him looking, neither of you bothered trying to pretend you hadn’t been looking. Your eyes met his, and one of you smiled; you can never remember who smiled first; then someone lifted his hand, and someone leaned forward, and someone pressed his lips to the other’s, a smile still on his face. Sometimes, when you tell the story to yourself, it was you who initiated it; sometimes, it was him. You sometimes like to imagine that you were both perfectly in sync with each other, and that you were both initiators.

You remember how he finally fell asleep with your back pressed firmly against his chest, and his chin resting on your shoulder, his deep, even breaths tickling the inside of your ear. You remember the warmth and weight of his arm around your waist, and the way his fingers absently stroked your hip.

You remember perfectly the very last conscious thought you had at seven o’clock that morning, before finally closing your eyes and falling asleep: you wondered if this was what love was - loosening nerves after a long drive, wandering fingers tracing designs on your skin, the sound of breaths in your ear like ocean waves, and through it all, a glowing, intense feeling comparable to contentedness or happiness or satisfaction, but so much more than that.

You don’t remember when or why, but at some point in time, you discarded that theory for a pessimistic view of love as an abstract, unobtainable fantasy that the naïve and overly romantic dreamed about, and imitated, but never actually found. Like Plato’s perfect Forms; it exists in theory, but nothing in this reality is actually it.

“Yes,” you say, “of course I remember.”

“That’s sort of how I feel right now,” he says, and your mind reels and your heart skips a beat before he goes on to say, “ridiculously tired, and all I want is to sleep, but I can’t.”

“You should take some Unisom,” you say. You wonder if he remembers the same things you remember.

The basic premise of my ~*~novel~*~: A semi-jumbled timeline of four to six years of Patrick Franklin's life, starting from the day before he moves to college. Since I love my angst, I'm going to drag this kid through dirt and rusty nails. But I think I'll attempt a moderately happy ending, for some of the main characters at least (there are three or four MCs). There'll be sexual identity crises, drug and alcohol abuse and addiction, physical confrontations, shame and disappointment. IT SHOULD BE FUN, YES?