Fiction Friday: Unrequited

I've decided to start a special section on this blog dedicated to Daily Writing Practice. Each week, I'll feature the best one (or an excerpt from a larger work) on my blog. For fun and stuff.

This one is a sci-fi piece, off-prompt, that explores an aspect of love. Hope you enjoy it. If you do, please feel free to comment and share. And if you don't like it, please let me know why. 

Unrequited

by Celeste Hollister

Word Count: 455

Safe for Work

In the end, we left empty-handed. We boarded our ship and left everything behind.

I dream about you, though. Such breathtaking splendor, those ice-penciled peaks, the crystalline pools, the star-spun cloth of midnight sky.

When I wake, I smell the cinnamon-fragrant reeds that waved at river's edge. I taste the honey-cool springs that fed the lake beside which we once slept.

It's easy, now, years hence. Deceptively simple to recall your glory, to forget the heartache. Even as I write these words, I feel the twinge in my fingers, once twisted beyond recognition by the jaws of that snarling monster. Though terror struck me blind at the moment of attack, I can look back and understand. It felt threatened. It was afraid. Or maybe it was hungry. Maybe I appeared like a tempting morsel as I paddled at the water's edge. As insignificant as a worm on a hook.

Either way, it was not the only creature to shed blood that afternoon. We killed it, and others. We left a trail of bones in our wake. After all you gave us, we answered with blood.

The doctor chides me. She says I should not focus on the past, that I should turn my eyes to the present moment, that I should live second to second, breath to breath.

I did that. I tried.

But every breath here is poison. Every second a lie. How can I explain that my heart remains fixed on a world light years away, beyond the reach of any of us? When people talk of finding love, do they only mean humans, or can a person also love a place?

I have no pictures. I lost my ability to sketch. I kept not a single stone, not a feather, nor a scale. Yes, I damaged the records containing your coordinates. They called it sabotage, but if we could not stay, then no one else would find you, not so long as I was alive to prevent it.

Now in the evening, I sit upon my rooftop. Beneath me, the city boils under a blanket of smog. My nostrils fill with the oily stink of cookfires and exhaust. My skin roughens from yet another scrim of blisters. The tea I drink tastes of sweat, and I long for a mouthful of your sparkling snow upon my tongue.

A creeping deluge slowly swallows earth. We'll roast to death long before the waters claim us. There is no hope that I will ever return. But if the ancients are right, that we choose our fate upon our passing from this life to the next, then I beg for us to be reunited.

Only then will I know peace.

Only then, in the end.  

New Year's Resolutions, 2016

2015 was the year that broke everything wide open. After years of sitting and waiting and 
worrying and debating, I risked it all. I quit teaching. My tiny child and I moved to another 
country. I published my novel, Reprieve. I got my heart broken by a man who abandoned us in 
Seoul. While that did suck, the rest turned out surprisingly well. And as Shakespeare says, “All's 
well that ends well.”

The really important part, though, is that this isn't the end. 2016 is just the beginning. There's a 
great quote by Marilyn Monroe: “Sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall 
together.” And Michael Ende says in The Neverending Story, “Nothing ends... Everything 
transforms.”

I really like that idea.

Each day, each year, we have the chance to change. And every year, I like to look back at who I 
was and who I am becoming. If we don't stop once in a while to have a look around, we may miss 
something. So this is me, having a look around.

Traditionally, I make goals in four categories: Health, Travel, Career, and a Reading Goal.

This year, I'd like to add an overall goal to be more generous. We try to give back in as many ways 
as we can. This year, I want to explore even more ways to help people, specifically people in the 
LGBTQ+ community.
Here are my goals for 2016. May everyone have a healthy, happy, and blessed year.
Health Goals      

1. Continue the Paleo/low-carb diet
2. Running Rewards
3. Daily Meditation
4. Cut back on screen time

When we moved back from Seoul, we moved in with my parents. My Mom's cooking is like some 
kind of special witchcraft. Her secret ingredient is bacon grease. With it, she can transform 
anything into an amazing southern comfort feast. Alas, it's about as healthy as eating mayonnaise 
straight from the jar with a Dorito.

So when we moved in, we made some changes to the menu. We're on a low-carb, mostly Paleo 
diet. My Mom and Dad have both lost twenty pounds since last March. I lost about seven pounds, 
but I gained it all back during the holidays (curse you Aunt Amy's asparagus casserole!)

Therefore, the goal here is to continue Paleo eating. I have also been running, and I got us 
memberships to the Activity Center. I've found that by rewarding myself after a set number of 
runs/workouts is a very effective motivator. After every 12 runs/workouts, I get to buy myself 
something nice – a nice book or some clothes. Total win-win!

As this category also deals with mental health, I would also like to maintain a state of mindfulness 
through the meditation techniques we learned in Intensive Outpatient Therapy (IOP) this fall.
One of my lifelong challenges is agoraphobia (which I'll expound upon in a later post), and I'm 
learning that meditation helps me manage anxiety associated with that condition.

With regret, I must admit, I suck at meditation. I seems like a simple thing, sitting still and 
quieting your mind, but my mind likes to scamper off in multiple directions, which is fantastic 
when I'm writing. Not so great when there's a battle of five armies raging in my head, and I'm 
trying to find a sense of peace.

I have three shiny new apps to help on this meditation journey: HeadSpace, Calm, and Stop-
Breathe & Think. It is my hope that these apps will guide me on the meditative path.

Bit of irony between the tools that will help achieve that goal and my final goal for this category. 
Through our IOP, I discovered that I spend a lot of time on my phones. Plural. I have two phones 
– one for business, one for games – and a third iPod device for books.

I alternate between the three of them, trailing charger cords about the house like I'm the Flying 
Spaghetti Monster. I use them for music, Facebook, Solitaire, Words With Friends, videos. The 
phones double as alarm clocks, so I am on a device from the moment I awake to the late hours 
when I wearily scroll through my Tumblr notifications one last time.

One thing we picked up in IOP is the idea that we should focus on one activity at a time. My 
brain loves to multitask, and the phones are perfect little enablers. I'm going to significantly cut 
back on the screen time this year. One way to do that is an app called Forest. This app allows you 
to put your phone into sleep mode. While its sleeping, a virtual forest grows. If you move to 
check your Instagram or answer a text, you kill the forest. This kind of proxy empathy works on 
me, so I'll use it.

I'm also going to implement device-free times like 'at the dinner table' or 'during family time'. I 
would never text while driving, so that's a given. I just want to be more present and mindful this 
year. That means less time looking at a glowy blue screen, and more time looking at the real 
world.Travel Goals

1. Plantation Tour
2. Road trip? Book signing tour?
3. Katrina: Hollywood or bust

Definitely on the books for Spring 2016, we have booked a plantation tour in Louisiana. This will 
include Katrina's first trip to New Orleans, a city which holds an odd allure for her. It could be in 
the name? Not sure, but we'll find out this March.

I also have a growing itch for another Epic Road Trip. This ERT would probably happen in the fall 
and would hopefully take us up the East coast to Maine, stopping in North Carolina, 
Pennsylvania, and New York along the way. Or, I may take us straight up through North Texas to 
Montana and possibly into Canada. This will require more research, something I love to do.

Katrina was invited to attend an acting/screenwriting workshop in Hollywood this July. We really 
want to see this happen. Since I'll be working for the San Marcos Parks & Rec department again 
this summer, I won't be able to ERT there with her. Nonetheless, it's an awesome opportunity 
that she will most likely attend.Career Goals

1. Publish Elsekind
2. Finish The Boy Who Painted Stars

This is one of the widest-openest parts of my life right now. Last year, I made the incredibly 
difficult decision to quit teaching. While I loved teaching and I am now and will always be 
devoted to my students, I realized last year that if I continue teaching, being an author would 
never be a reality. Both paths require the whole of a person's heart. I was still trying to do both 
and spinning in circles.

I published Reprieve, and people are reading it. Actually buying and reading it!

So I'm going to continue writing for as long as I can. Hopefully until I'm 140 years old and I ascend 
to a higher plane through some kind of virtual upload. That would be freakin' awesome.Reading Goal

I began keeping track of the books I've read after reading On Writing by Stephen King. He reads 
in the neighborhood of 80 books each year, and at the time I was struggling to make time for 
ten. The first year, my goal was 12 books – one a month – and I read 16.

Last year, my goal was 52 books – one a week – and I read 56. Of course, my own book, Reprieve, 
was on that list, but whatever, I read it. It counts.

This year my goal is to read 54 books. Maybe I'll read 60! I cannot wait to dive in to all of these 
wonderful worlds.

I track all of my reading on Goodreads. Occasionally, I also post reviews.

So that's it, my first look forward into the new year. May everyone have a terrific time as we 
mark another passage around the sun. 2016, this is just the beginning.

The Little Paris Bookshop - Book Review

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The title is too narrow for all that this book encompasses. Though it begins with the quaint bookshop on a barge in the Seine, it rapidly expands beyond it, to the charming setting of the French canals, and then further south to Marseilles and Provence.
My critique of the book, however, does not stop with the title. Thought the writing is exquisite – truly masterful and lovely in some places – my frustration stems more from annoyance with the outdated notion that a man must complete a woman, or vice versa, in order to find happiness. In fact, the number of outmoded, non-progressive sex roles disheartened me, leading me to wonder if it is, perhaps, a cultural phenomenon. Do the French actually, readily embrace the Nina George's notion that, to paraphrase, 'women are horses that must be tamed by men, who must likewise use the rider's crop of their words and actions to soothe and cajole a woman's emotions?'
These narrow ideas about women and men triggered my involuntary gag reflex. That said and aside, the central relationship of the novel is surprisingly liberal. The author flirts with polyamory as a panacea of the romantic ills of the three main characters. Even at the end of the book, there is the suggestion of unfulfilled hopes and compatibility, so that in spite of its lock-step with present social roles and relationship dogmas, the author hints that there is a potential better way – more open, more accepting, and more forgiving.
There was nothing wrong with this book. It's a fine book with a fine plot. The characters live, love, and breathe within the boundaries of its pages. The only thing I disliked, apart from the  vaguely misleading title, was the somewhat cliched romance of its central plot.


View all my reviews

My Parents' Patio Re-Design, Finale

My parents came home this afternoon, and we had almost finished the patio project. All we need now is lighting, mounting fixtures for the wall art, and wind chimes (must have wind chimes).

Here are the pictures of the finished project:

Dexter approves.

My Parents' Patio Re-Design, Part Three

Yesterday, my parents went out of town for a sort of family reunion. The moment they were out the door, we did this:

We cleared away the furniture and swept the concrete. We then scrubbed with our old favorite: bleach and water. 

 

We painted the couch and ladderback chair. All of this furniture my Mom bought at various garage sales over the years, with the exception of my Dad's rocking chair, which I bought with my first paycheck from Walgreen's in 1991. It's actually my Mom's rocking chair, but my Dad sits in it. I used custom-mixed Olympic exterior paint for the blue and Valspar Cherry for the red chairs. 

For the metal accessories, I decided to use spray paint. I took apart the little glass-and-metal table to repaint, only to find that the glass wouldn't come out of the metal frame. 

\

Not a problem. I cut out a mat of wrapping paper, taped it over the glass, and painted the metal frame with the exterior paint. 

In the next post, I'll include the photos from the completed patio project. Click here to see them!

My Parents' Patio Redesign, Part Two

My Mom's Love Language is Acts of Service. My Dad's Love Language is Quality Time. When we decided to re-decorate my parents' patio, we realized that it was a way to show them love through both of their Love Languages.

We started by cleaning all of the wooden patio furniture. I used a bleach/water solution in a spray bottle. Fortunately, the weather had done a good job of smoothing all the edges, leaving the surfaces soft and porous enough for painting.

My Mom said she liked these cushions on a random shopping trip, so I went back and bought them:

And we used these cushions as the basis of our color scheme. We wanted something bright and lively, that would also incorporate my parents' favorite colors: red for my Mom, yellow for my Dad (and blue for me, just because).

(Painted with the blood of our enemies)

After painting these chairs, it proceeded to rain every day for three weeks. Oh yeah, welcome back to Texas, where the weather does whatever the heck it pleases.

To see the next step on our patio re-do, click here. 

My Parents' Patio Re-design, Part One

When my daughter and I moved to Korea last fall, I thought that my parents would be fine. Sure, yes, we have a very close relationship with my Mom and Dad. They are good people, and everyone who knows them adores them.

But when my Grannye got sick and we came home, we moved into my parents home, ostensibly until we could find another place. It became clear, though, that both of my parents were suffering from degrees of depression -- my Mom due to the grief of losing her mother, and my Dad just continuing with his life-long battle.

Mom and Dad asked us to stay with them, to help take care of them. Generously, they have given us a place to live for the last four months. Even more generously, they refuse to accept money for rent.

Back in 2004, when my parents built this house, they spent a lot of time on the back patio, drinking coffee and smoking with my Mom's sisters, the Aunts. Mom has since given up smoking (yay!!) and the patio's popularity has sadly waned. But it is a lovely space, full of good energy with a view of the trees and the neighborhood park. We wanted to give back to my parents, and quickly decided that re-vamping the patio (in secret) would be a good way to do it.

Here's a before video of the patio, taken about a month ago:

Before link, click here.