Writing Prompt

Hey.
Know what?
Whatever, that's what! Whatever!
Who the hell cares if it isn't good? I'll never be Mozart, I'll always always always be Salieri, but who cares? Salieri is one of the most interesting characters I've ever read!

So here, without further ado, is my response to the writing prompt:
"They had nothing to say to each other"

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They have nothing to say to each other. And everything still left to say. They want nothing to do with each other, and desperately want more. Each one silently begs the other to close the distance between them, to reach, to touch, to kiss, to kneel.

Neither is willing to take the risk.

Isn’t this how happy endings end? The love is still there, somewhere, buried under wounded pride and self preservation. It’s subsisting, suffocating under the weight of promises broken, dreams delayed, and the voiced concerns that maybe ought not to have been given voice.

The love still wheezes despite the declining sex life, the multiplying white lies, the bifurcating senses of humor, and working opposite shifts.

They still want to kiss. They still want the magic hand of cinema or story-book to sweep over the scene and mend the egos, repair the relationship, blur the edges of the pain and deliver that happily ever after—no mistakes this time, no fucking it up.

Somewhere in their romantic hearts they yearn for the crescendo and swell of theme music to underscore a grand reconciliation. They wait for a lighting shift and birds to sing and slow-motion running through a field, or through a crowded city street, or along the foggy length of the train platform as the locomotive chugs unstoppably away.

They want the clichés. The conventions that make us simultaneously scoff and weep when we see them in cinema or read them in drug store novels. They are desperately complicated people but so very simple.

But heavy, grim realities stand like a chasm between them. He fucked someone else, lied about it, she found out. She hasn’t climaxed without a vibrator in six months, he feels un-manned. He has a job offer in L.A., she hates the west coast. She may be falling in love with someone at work-- and is there anything that can beat the giddy, glorious feeling of that first flush of feeling?

And that’s where cinema and stories fail us, fail the couple who can’t make it work. Film after film, story after story, what we see and want and long for and receive is the falling in love, the chase, the highly-charged, ever exciting, impossibly prolonged fall into mad, passionate, glorious, stuff-dreams-are-made-of LOVE! Sometimes it ends with a wedding, sometimes death- but either way it has a certain finality from which there is no coming back.

We don’t see, nor do we really want to see the rest of the story. Perhaps we’ll accept some title cards, just to wrap things up in a pretty bow: “The two went on to have three beautiful children. He became a doctor, she practiced law. They were very happy”., but beyond bite-sized morsels we can’t stomach any more.

With the exception of Indie fans we don’t care to watch a film about taking out the trash and working 40+ hours a week, dusting the surfaces of the bookshelves, deciding what to have for dinner night after night, sex that inevitably slows down, a woman who shaves with less frequency, a man who is gassy.

And all the stupid, trivial, nagging arguments. The casual put-downs, the careless comments. The thoughtless actions and the selfish ones. The step by step decline and degradation of that highly idealized, overly romanticized, up-on-a-pedestal LOVE.

We have no guidebook for dealing with that. It feels like we’re blindsided by the mundane reality, betrayed by the films and the fairytales. And inevitably we end up resenting our all too human partner for failing to remain god-like, heroic, pristine, ever-charming, perfect. Sometimes we might even idly wish that our story had been one of the ones that end with death- because at least in death nothing ever changes.

Now the cliché they have achieved is a sadder, more statistical one. They have nothing to say to each other. They will let their lawyers speak for them.