Chila Woychik

I am Frustration. I am Memory-Lost. Sometimes I read a line a dozen times before it sticks. My creative force has slipped. I type slower, speak slower, think at a snail__ pace. I__ Life shapeshifted by Post Traumatic Stress, bastardized by Fate.

The unrelenting grip of Soldier__ Syndrome slips finger by slow finger. The marrow__ been affected__motional leukemia at the deepest level. Transplants of love and friendship aid healing, yet time is still key, and the clock never ticks fast enough. Eternity gains perspective when seconds feel like years. How long have I been gone? Six eternities and counting.

Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It__ climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to go and after that a jungle, a minefield, a rapids. (Can I stop smiling now?)Once, not long ago, I was flung off the cliff of the moment, thrust into an illicit relationship with destiny, an affair not of my making. Was I making love or being raped? The lines were fuzzy.

sunset and evening star hunching and bending sleeping and slipping virus pneumonia coughing and crying hope in the small things heaven looks brighter aching and falling earth is still darkness slip into sleeping sleepings of death dead now and buried cold now and crumbling dust now and hope-filled heaven is hope (and loneliness lingers in those left behind)

I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work__nd each other. You__e my friend? Don__ pick up that pen!

I don__ want to believe in boxes or one-way relationships; I__ naïve, you see. I__ rather moon the moon than flip off a friend, but sometimes I flip so I don__ get flipped. And I still think I__ misunderstanding the Golden Rule.

Let__ face it: suffering discredits goodness. I__ agnostic in practice though faith-based in theory. I used to pray but now know he__l do what he darn well pleases when he darn well pleases. Will he listen? Maybe. We have a book that says so, but how much happens beyond that book, I can__ say. That__ agnosticism in its bleakest and most honest form. Don__ judge me, yet believe me when I tell you that years of abuse tend to wring out every ounce of one__ ability to understand and adhere to faith in standard form.

Split your skull__ hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument__ scalpel, perhaps__nd make a hand-sized slit; it doesn__ matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the inside layer of membrane and yank, hard. If it feels like you__e just turned your brain inside out, you have. Writing is brain surgery, pure and simple.

I suck the words word-dryto me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speedstill hard and hardersofter thenline-lined book-dry__il not a dropof water-bloodfrom oak and elmand authored menis left to whisper__ead_

I__e had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam__ cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut__wallows me up like so many remains__ army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.Such is a writer__ life.

I have a bad habit of dropping verbal pellets to get a reaction, like Ursula LeGuin__ __ novelist__ business is lying_ (that particular one got a lot of attention on Facebook), or, __hy is it that Christians hate the word __ex_?

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn__ turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and . . . read.But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you__e become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes.

The no-booze rule is one of several shams perpetuated by certain religious groups, presumably to keep their flocks in line. After all, what__ a shepherd to do with drunk sheep? So take your medicine, but leave the booze on the shelf. We have a label to keep, and it__ not Jack Daniels. Don__ mourn for me. Just tell me what to do rather than teach me what to be. Slam another pill, pop that one last sedative_you__l find me in the kitchen, washing my glass.

I was a late bloomer. I was still naïve about what 16 year olds today have known for years. I remember sitting up and taking notice__f the world, my body, others__n a way never before experienced. I noticed boys, or rather they noticed me, at 16.

I__e never had a rat, never chased one. I chase my own tail and that__ enough. I must now make plans for the day I catch it.