Welcome, welcome, welcome everyone to the very first Open Mic Friday on this blog! The format is simple. Every week there will be a featured “reading” in the body of this post: either something from me, a guest post, or a selected contribution from the previous week’s Open Mic (that might be you!). In the comments, you’re warmly invited to share some work of your own: a prose excerpt, flash fiction, a poem, or even non-textual art (images, music, video, you name it!). To keep conversation and creative spirit flowing, please applaud and cheer for others’ offerings just as loudly as you would at a physical reading — by commenting on their work and giving props to everyone.
Tips:
- If your work is short, feel free to paste it into the comment box. Otherwise, I recommend posting your work elsewhere and including the link in the comments (with a sentence of description so we know what we’re clicking for!). You are totally welcome to record a video of yourself reading/performing, in lieu of the text.
- Comments are threaded, which means you can reply directly to each reader by hitting the “reply” button within that comment box. Let’s get some conversations going!
- Be polite and supportive, or you will be booed from the room. This Open Mic is happening every week, and discourteous attendees will be barred.
- I may contact you asking to share your contribution, or requesting a guest post, for future Open Mics!
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This week I was going to share a little something about the summer when I was thirteen, but I spent yesterday evening with some members of my VONA family, and their incredible stories made me want to be braver and dig deeper. I wrote this last night after I got home.
My life is a blessed one. Every good thing there is, has come to me. I want for nothing: not love, not money, not skills or talent or recognition. As I write this I’m terrified that I’m jinxing myself, that by declaring this so boldly I will attract the attention of the gods of misfortune — the disembodied forces of doom I know are out there — and they will swoop upon me with fatal accuracy.
I have so long feared their attentions. I don’t remember when it first dawned on me that other people’s lives weren’t as easy as mine. Maybe it was in high school, maybe it was earlier. But whenever and however it happened, I remember thinking it over and being gradually overwhelmed by utter dread. Life is suffering, the Buddha said. So far mine has not been. And so, when it comes, it’s sure to be bad. One day my luck will run out.
I see it constantly, this fate. I’ve been given so much, surely it will be taken away. Some days I am absolutely certain I will not live to see 30. I can taste the cancer in my flesh, the sickness in my bones, the sudden death in the night. Some days I know I’ll live longer, but be struck blind, unable ever to draw again. I think blindness would be better than early death. I think.
I see my husband dead before my eyes, his life erased in a speeding collision the way his best friend’s ended so many years ago. I see my life without him, the long years of loneliness, the emptiness. I will have my art, I think, or I can join the Peace Corps. But even then, I wonder if I could live without him.
I see my younger sisters dead before me, the two people in the world I would give my all to protect. I see them suffering, in agony, myself powerless to save them from harm. I see the despair in their eyes turn to terror, I see them knowing what’s coming and looking to me for help I cannot give.
I see my parents, hurt by innumerable betrayals by their children, afraid, alone. I see them growing old without the daughters they sacrificed everything to raise in comfort: their own lives squandered for nothing. Afraid, aged, frail, alone, alone.
These are the visions that haunt me underneath my conscious. I see them lurking with every new day of delight and every new blessing I receive, from the loving new friends to the prizes won in contests. With every new triumph I await my payback time. I see it a thousand different ways. I see it in every misfortune I’ve ever heard of or witnessed. My loved ones: the victims in the burning car. The innocent bystanders caught in gunfire. The ones ailing from horrible diseases, the ones killed by freak accidents, car crashes, plane crashes, bombings, fires, earthquakes, murder, drowning. Them, or me.
I tell myself I’m being silly, I should enjoy my beautiful life in peace. But I don’t know anyone else who’s had a life like mine, so untouched by loss or trouble. Just statistically speaking, it doesn’t seem like it can hold out. Even my sisters, who were raised alongside me, have not been blessed as ostentatiously, in so many ways large and small. They’re not the charmed ones, I am. The question is always lurking: when will it fall apart?
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Thank you with all my heart for reading! On Monday I’ll return with more art talk, so have a lovely weekend and I’ll see you then! In the meantime — comment away!!! And tell everyone you know! The stage is open… it’s your turn.
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
As a writing exercise this is beautiful, Lisa — so unabashably open and honest — heartwrenchingly so. However, philosophically it troubles me. How much time do we waste when we are constantly exposing ourselves to the worse case scenario. There is a saying which I will attribute to Vernon Howard (tho it has been said in different ways by many others), “We attract what we fear.” So we give fear an astonishing amount of power over our lives. God never punishes us, but fear certainly does! I would instead celebrate the abundant good fortune by giving and sharing and expressing thanks every day to this amazing universe…….Well, as a writing exercise you certainly got me thinking, and that is what good writing does. Thank you, Lisa.
Thank you, Sherry! I’m so glad my writing made you think. I’m glad you mentioned not giving fear too much power — writing this out actually made much of the fear go away, to my surprise. I’ve noticed this so many times while writing: naming our fears diminishes them, and gives the power back to us. I’m so glad I wrote about these terrible fears because I’ve cowered under them for so long, and after facing them in this piece I feel much better. 🙂
Thanks so much for sharing your deep fears here. Mortality visits while we are unaware. The trick is stay alert as much as we can, so if and when we are whisked away, we have at least lived a life worth leaving behind for others to feel its impact. I had to deal with death pretty early on — cancer in my 20s, living through 9/11 in NYC right after that, then my mother’s sudden death — all within the span of about 5 years. So I totally hear ya on the despondency on lurking doom. But like the post above, focus on the life part of life-and-death. ‘Cuz death–it always comes too soon, regardless.
In that light, I’m gonna share a flash fiction piece I wrote awhile back. Feedback, tho’ optional, is always welcome.
Life Notice
by Anna Alves
In the California section of the Los Angeles Times on the Thursday that she received it, plucked from her doorstep from whence it lounged after having traveled, airborne, from the flick of a newsboy’s wrist (she likes to imagine), there was a front page feature of a woman who At 99, she’s living life for others as a psychotherapist—her third flourishing career!—treating people who cannot afford help elsewhere, who gardens and travels to New Zealand and works out with a personal trainer because “I was put on this Earth to accomplish certain things, I’m so far behind, I can never die,” then a Page 3 lead story in the Obituaries about the suicide of a 46 year old man, Innovative author won critics’ raves, detailing how he brought joy and exuberance to the written word, rejuvenated the novel, was a beloved teacher at a local college, leaving behind a wife and a sister, and that with his imagination “often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone,” and in the section opposite entitled Other Deaths, that is where she found her brother, the Army private, two-thirds of the way down, listed after three others, an efficient eleven lines, not mentioning his love of balut and live band karaoke, but alluding to the roadside bomb and the Humvee, ending with, “He was 20 years old.”
The best advice I’ve read on mortality was a piece by a nurse in the NYT a while back: “The antidote to death is life.” Most days I remember this and it comforts me.
Thank you so much for kicking off the open mic with “Life Notice”! I love how you’ve incorporated three life stories into this one super-short piece. One thing that distracted me while I was reading was the formatting: lots of stuff packed into a single paragraph, with the grammatically slightly disjointed headlines interspersed.
I feel like I read a piece recently in which a character liked to write stories using newspaper headlines… that wasn’t your writing, was it? Was it something we read in VONA?
lol…yep, that was Gabby making one of her Frankenstein Stories. Re: Life Notice, I was working through an exercise to tell a fully-formed story in one long sentence-paragraph. I’m wondering if there’s something I can do with punctuation to make it feel like there are better pauses? Or perhaps, I’ll edit it down even more and incorporate rhyme and more figurative language and turn it into a prose poem? Lot’s to ponder…
I guess creativity does indeed breed creativity!
Hee, glad that was you. I thought it was too weird a coincidence if there were two separate people doing newspaper-headlines stories…
Hmm, so it needs to be one sentence. I think in that case it helps if you’re extra-clear about transitions between “scenes” (the individuals in the headlines) as well as between phrases and clauses. For instance, the current transition between the 99-year-old and the innovative author is just “then,” which jars rather than guides the reader into recognizing that we’re moving on.
But yes, poetry would work too I think — go the other way instead of using hyper-clean prose. 🙂
Just a note — the following phrases in the piece above were actual headlines I used from a daily newspaper. I didn’t know how to bold them within the text above:
At 99, she’s living life for others
Innovative author won critics’ raves
Other Deaths
Anna, I just boldfaced them for you! Let me know if it doesn’t look right.
Perfect! Thanks muchly!
great piece! i don’t think i need to reiterate (since i think i’ve mentioned before how much we think alike on this topic) how often i feel this way as well. sean just left for a weekend camping/surfing trip in socal and before he left i said, “have fun, be safe, but most importantly, come back to me.” he knows how deathly afraid i am that he’ll die before his time and leave me behind. while i agree that we shouldn’t let fear rule our lives, it can be a good reminder to live each day fully (as cliche as that sounds) and appreciate everything that we’re given.
PS: i think a slightly unhealthy “reader’s digest” habit in our early days may have nourished this affliction a bit, no? ;P hehe
OMG, it’s so the fault of Reader’s Digest… all those stories about how so-and-so’s husband (newly married only a year or two, about to celebrate their anniversary, two days before her birthday) kissed her at the door and said “see you later” with that smile she loved and remembered from their first dates, and then THAT WAS THE LAST TIME SHE EVER SAW HIM ALIVE. At 4:34 that afternoon he was on the road/at his job/in the boat when there was a major accident/fire/shark attack. If I could take back all those “real-life drama” stories I read I WOULD!!!
Laughing out loud! (Who would have thought that Reader’s Digest should have come in a plain brown paper wrapper so that impressionable young people wouldn’t stumble on it, and ruin their life forever?)
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