stream of consciousness

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

The bathroom as a place of silent reflection.¹

“The bathroom makes a philosopher of us all.”

OR

“He was the great bathroom philosopher.”

And tie philosophy into excrement in the toilet.

I wish I could experience the fullness of my being in a brief moment that lasts forever.

Christmas². He’d tallied up the cost one day, and determined that, in general, one breaks even; you tend to receive in value what you’ve given to others. Well, he thought, why go through all that effort to break even when you could just do nothing and wind up in exactly the same state.

Luck is merely the perception of a pattern in the midst of chaos, the one-in-a-million favorable outcome already predicted by the cold hard numbers of statistics.

For anyone who’s had a bad year³, I’d like you to remember the Phoenix, for, just as the mythical bird is borne of its own dying ashes, so too can you hope that 2014 will be a good year, born from the painful ashes of 2013. Happy New Year, everyone!

Story⁴ about a guy who, in waking and sleeping, jumps about through various stages of his life, and maybe how this ultimately serves some purpose, makes it so he can do something synchronized across different times.

Light fractured along the surface of the glass⁵ like shards of stained glass⁵.

Golden light sparkled like needles, making Jared squint.

Long jagged crystals of light jutted through the glass surface.

He stared at the sun until the light began to hurt his eyes, then returned his gaze to the computer, where a shifting inkblot followed him wherever he looked.

Footnotes

1. I think I was just being silly here.

2. I was fleshing out a potential character, not expressing my own views about Christmas. I’m not this miserly, I promise!

3. I ultimately intended to post this on Facebook for New Year’s Day, then promptly forgot to do so. Oh well, now I can post it here instead.

4. Sometimes, I know right off the bat that what I’m freewriting is going to be a potential story.

5. Not my proudest moment as a writer… I guess my subconscious was feeling redundant that day. When I wrote this, I was attending a celebratory dinner with co-workers and had decided to pull out my notebook, zone out and focus on the way the light was reflecting off the glass table (doh, I said that word again!)

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

The same wind that bristled the leaves of the trees and whispered sweet nothings in Jared’s ears, a song of peace, a ballad of content. It caressed the tender flesh of his cheeks and face, ruffled and tousled his hair like a father or a mother, like a friend, like a lover.

The sky cycled through light and dark, periodic bursts of life and energy that pulsed like a heart, pumping life and energy into the world, which vibrated and tingled and hummed sweetly with the beautiful presence of life, a deep rumbling sound from deep within the earth that resonated with Jared’s own heart.

Wet paw prints adorned the sidewalk, brief photographs that would quickly fade like the afterflash¹ of a camera, echos² of a time that had ceased to exist the moment it had come.

Life speeds on by, like a dream. Though we feel rooted to the moment, to all the many trivialities and comforting mundanities, that moment is speeding, hurtling through time and space at the speed of light. Each moment fades and ceases to be as soon as it comes into existence.

The years melt and bleed, run into one another until they form a bittersweet alloy of incoherent half remembered³ thoughts and moments, an insubstantial haze made of moonbeams and gossamer threads.

A moment’s existence⁴ meets its end before our minds even have the chance to process it; we perceive not the Words of creation themselves, but only their echo.

Footnotes

1. I’m pretty sure afterflash isn’t a word, nor does it even make sense. Flash would surely have been sufficient.

2. Why yes, I am aware of the misspelling. Thanks for noticing 😉

3. That should probably be half-remembered. *

4. I ultimately decided to use this passage in a novel called Purely Coincidental, a dark fantasy for adults which I talked about here.

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.