I’m trying to think about how to write honestly. This is for when I get tired of my own voice, my writing voice, and tired of making up things that don’t make sense. I had an idea from a couple unrelated fragments in my notebook, and I was trying to connect them, but it was confusing, and things don’t always have to be confusing. I’ll just tell you exactly what I thought–which might still be unclear.

I imagined a myth about a great war between a society of bears and a really big fish. The fish lived in a huge lake. The fish was so big that its entire body almost filled the entire space of the lake. The fish would eat all the smaller fish in the lake, and because of that, the bears were always hungry. They both really wanted the lake to themselves, so they had a war. It was like a final boss situation because the fish was so big. It was a long and brutal war. Many bears died. But one day it was over. The fish was defeated, and the bears had a great feast. To remember the war, a couple bears carved the story of the war on the big fish scales, and all the bears came together to bury them somewhere in the forest. They wanted future generations to find the scales and see the story, so they would know the history. 

One of the main scale carvers lost his tongue in the war. That’s from a poem I wrote in my notebook for an in-class exercise. 

The bear has no tongue.

It was lost in the war against

the great fish, which the bears

won, but no triumph comes

without a cost–a great loss.

The world claims its prizes,

this one from inside his great

big mouth, out from in between 

his mountainous white teeth:

the tongue: a land that lols within.

The bear laments through silent

tears and thinks:

My tongue! My poor tongue,

and all the songs I could have sung.

The first line of that poem is from a short story we read for class called “The Lover” by Joy Williams.

Then I imagined how it might feel to be an object put away in a time capsule. Like if I was the fish scale. But I only started thinking that because of another fragment from my notebook which went like this:

I’m sort of turning into a brighter thing as time goes on. I forget your eyes appear vacant to me, and when I look, I sink deeper into some despairing hole, very deep somewhere underneath where I should be. I sink and you stay up, looking down at my shrinking self. This is the opposite of ejection. I’m getting lost, and you seem to have a big shovel which doesn’t care for me. We could go to an entirely different place. I know it. In various ways, you make a portal, but I know it’s a trap. I refuse to get trapped. 

Kind of dramatic, but that’s what helped me think of the bears burying the fish scale like a sort of time capsule. And then I was thinking about what I would put in a time capsule. What objects are important to me? Or what would I want my future self to have? Would that stuff get more important over time? What would I even be doing that for? Or what would it say about me, if other people found it way after I die? It feels weird.

Here’s another part I found with the previous section:

We must be inside of real time, the realm of ever, of happening, of now, and of no moments before and after now. There are unlimited good mornings here.

Thanks for reading.