Brendan Peveril . net

My goal today was to write something that I liked well enough to post here. I hid in a coffee shop until that happened. Results are below the cut. It’s a little piece of the novel I’m writing, and it’s based loosely on a dream I had last night.

Katrina,
Last night I dreamed about winter. The packed snow in the back yard, the rattling frozen branches, and the long cold nights. It’s fleeting, now, I’m having a hard time pegging down details, but the sensations, the things I haven’t felt in such a long time, have really stuck with me. The impressions, the sensations, and the memories they’re bringing back.
Do you remember the ice storm when we were twelve? It shut the city down for days, we had no school, and nobody was on the streets. When the snow finally let up we went out to the park. Everything was coated in ice. The snow drifts looked like they were made of blown glass and the trees creaked and groaned under the weight on the branches. We found the newspaper that had been frozen to the park bench. The headline on the soggy paper said, “Big Storm Coming,” through the coating of ice.
Then again, years later at our first apartment together, when the power went out during the storm. We sat alone together in the dark, listening to the sound of the wind, blasting against the walls and tearing at the roof. You finally fell asleep and I tucked the blanket around your face in the candle light. Then you freaked out when the landlord banged on our door to make sure that we were okay.
These moments, fragile and fleeting memories, are what my life is made of, as empty as I might feel they are sometimes. To turn my back on them is to shove aside myself, and any revelation I might find when I’m not being myself doesn’t make any sense.
When I left, when I came to Arizona, I thought I was chasing some genuine experience that I thought I couldn’t find in the East, with you. I wanted some kind of a life changing revelation, some Deus ex Machina to bring meaning to things that felt empty. Now, I don’t even know what I thought I was after. I’m just going through motions, a spiritual quest for the sake of something to do. Following other peoples’ paths, reading someone else’s book, just because I don’t like my own. This was supposed to make things better, to bring me perspective so I could find meaning and peace, but all it’s done is rub in my face what I’ve left behind. Sometimes when you find yourself you don’t like what you find, and I think I’m finding that the whole spiritual quest thing has been a waste of my time, that I had it right in the first place. In a way, I suppose that’s the perspective I was looking for all along.
I know that it doesn’t excuse what I’ve done, that I’ve abandoned you and you have no reason to forgive me. I want to start over, though, to atone for the things I’ve done. I’m coming home. I’m not sure when I’ll be there, but I’ll call you when I get into town. I’m on my own path now and, more than I ever have before, I feel like I’m doing the right thing.

Lucius