It feels as if I haven’t been away at all. I have been right here at home from the start without even leaving my room once. Every minute mother would come in to ask me this and that. Then father would come in and ask me this and that. I decided to print out Stephen King’s quote to stick it to the wall right in front of my eyes. When trying to get my head clear and controlling my excessive anger outbreaks, I would stare at those words and remember my promise; the promise I had made to myself.

I guess people still do not know that don’t like discussions. I rarely discuss anything, unless I truly share a passion about it. All I want is to hear STORIES! YOUR STORIES! Anything else doesn’t matter, does it? Who cares? Why am I bringing this up again! It’s done with.

Now I’m beginning to understand why that former friend of mine said that writing is mere soliloquy. I am not better than a bum talking to a pigeon or bumble bee.

It seems to me that the only person in this family who actually cares about the stability of this family is my mother; my mother alone. All the rest (that includes me) is so apathetic that it’s breaking her heart.  I have not much to share with realists and she is one of those; it’s terrible, but also admirable. She will be the one to keep the family together and I love her for it, even though I know she’ll resent all of us for giving almost zero support. I don’t know how my dad or sister feels here, but I hate myself for being such an egocentric antihero. But you do not understand, unless you remember my four goals which I once listed. It’s goal number two – something that I think about every single fucking day. Actually it should be goal number one, BUT things need to be done in order, especially goal one and goal two. Goal number two can only be fulfilled once goal number one has been achieved. If you remember the goals, then you’ll understand why I am under such an indescribable pressure that kills me every day, even when having holidays. I need to get started. I need time. I need space. I need room to breathe. I need my I.R.. I need to work hard. I work for no one except for my family and myself. You may judge me (hell do it), but you may not judge the way I am with my family. I know what I am like, but now that you know how I really feel on the inside – please shut your trap.

I know people talk about short attention span. Is there anything like a short patience span? Impatience sounds way too simplistic and childish. I have been uncontrollably impatient all my life, similar to the white rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s famous tale. Every day seems to end hourly for me and I know damn well how unhealthy this attitude is, but I cannot help it. I just want my parents to have more years of happiness ahead of them, instead of years of struggle and desperation.  That’s why I need to get going. Get going. Life writing isn’t getting me anywhere right now. I need to start working with I.R. who is my muse (King’s muse is male and so is mine!), my inspiration and my other half. Something needs to change rapidly before I collapse. Now staring at King’s quote breaks my heart, because I’ve not been following his rule today. There are distractions in each corner, distractions that need considerations; otherwise I would make my life even harder to live. As I said, it’s this short patience span.

It had been a while since Laurie’s last short story. But getting back to work by starting from scratch was not easy. The journey of a story is trickiest. You draw a destination and a starting point on a map and then you begin to sketch out your trip to your destination.
In fact, once you’ve had a long break from writing, you’ll feel anxious about planning out that inner journey again. They say talents don’t go; instead they get buried in the basement. She also realised that her confidence to write fiction had disappeared almost completely. Whom does she write for other than herself?
Stephen King calls that person the “Ideal Reader”. Laurie knew where her I.R. had disappeared to and therefore she started packing her bags to go to Lübeck.

As she knocked on I.R.’s door, she heard him say “Come in.”
The door squeaked. She smelt freedom, tranquillity and solitude in the hotel room, but also some tension.
“Hello” she murmured.
I.R. was sitting by his desk, scribbling something onto paper. He still looked beautiful as ever, but the sense loneliness floating in that room made him appear distant.
“I knew you’d come back crawling one day” he said.
“I am not crawling.”
“You would, though.”
She smiled. She knew that despite her honesty toward the entire world, he was the only one to ever hear everything from her.
Awkward silence hung in the air, making the room grow even bigger than it already appeared to be.
“You know things haven’t been easy for me” she sobbed.
“Neither for me. You needed some space, so I granted you that.”
He carried on scribbling words down. She noticed a pile of paper next to him on the desk.
“What are those?”
I.R. looked at her and smiled for the first time since her arrival.
“Well” he began, “these are ideas still locked up in the back of your head.”
“Locked up?”
“Yeah, with me inside.”
The moment she approached him, he stopped writing after a nervous flinch. It felt there was a shield between them, separating two delicate worlds that weren’t meant to fuse with each other.
“Don’t” he said.
“How can I open the door?” I asked.
“You can’t.”
There were traces of fear and desperation spread on his face, guided by an encouraging smile.
“Only I can open it”, he said quietly.
He turned back to his writing, as though she wasn’t there. She was still standing there in despair, unable to approach him, unable to put her hand on his shoulder.
She remembered they first met when they were eleven and used to be inseparable since. Now was the first time ever that she felt that the connection had been cut off. It was a matter of trust; trust leading towards confidence, will and plenty of hard work. Consolidated teamwork would rebuild that broken connection.
“You’ve just read what King wrote. Sort out your tool box now and get started.”
Now her heart began to fill with hope.
“So you’re still my muse?”
He gestured at the pile of paper on his desk and started to laugh, as though saying “What a ridiculous question!”
“Well” he said, “first revitalize your language, sort out your grammar and work on your style. They are appalling. Your recent stories are good, but they need a hell of a lot of polishing and you know it. I can’t open the door for you if you don’t start putting your shoulder to the wheel.”
There was a long pause between them again. Though, this time the silence had dissolved the tension.
“Will you forgive me?” she asked.
He laughed. “You are writing this now. You’re gonna make me forgive you anyway! Have I got a choice? But honestly…” he paused and then looked at her in earnest. “Don’t you know me at all?”

Paula Cheung 2010

(in dedication to Stephen King’s On Writing)

Door has been locked from the inside of this hole
Curtains drawn, pour the midnight wine
Typing words that disappear in a vaccum
Visualizing images that fade from grey to black

Empty pages the tree had silently bled for
Bad karma is the cause of our wounded core
Imagination, hope and the good will
Enable a smile wrapped in our own despair

Our precious is nothing but opaque ornaments
Putting us into financial predicaments
Beauty, beauty feeds the hungry hole
And only mercy will save our dirty little souls

(2009)

I am very glad that I went on that holiday. I’d have preferred staying in the hotel most of the time, if it hadn’t been the cleaning lady. I never knew when she started to work and I’d rather be out of the room before hearing someone knock. The beach was beautiful when I went on Tuesday. Luckily the weather had been pretty nice, except for that horrible cold wind that had nearly got me a bladder infection. I did feel a slight pain on the same day, but thank God I felt alright the day after. At least it had been mild enough to walk on the beach. I’d suggest you to travel to the beach early in the morning, when nobody is around. The giant fog that morning had swallowed everything up, even the sea. The sea was green and still as tired as me. I was being chased by a couple; when saying “couple”, I mean ducks. They were clingy as fuck; begging for food. I wish I had had some. It impressed me how male and female ducks stick together like elderly human couples. Then I had a very peculiar and strange encounter with a bumble bee on the beach.  More to it here, here2 and here3. I have nothing more to say to that, I do not.

The next day I went to the beach again. It was cloudy and fucking hell it was cold and WINDY. I hadn’t brought that many clothes with me to that trip in first place. What really annoyed me was that no café was open for me to warm up in. There was absolutely nothing around except hotels and pubs filled with conservative middle aged people staring at my tights as if I was whorish. However, it’s good going to the beach early, as Lübecker kids would start hanging around on the beach during lunch time. Nowadays teenagers hang around on the playground, but why on the playground if you have a fantastic beach in Lübeck?

I had spent hours picking up beautiful stones; the flat and the shiny ones always impress me, also found little empty sea shells that hadn’t fallen apart after being washed to the shore.

I myself cannot believe that I actually did start a video blog on my trip. I should have just yelled how much you all sucked or something and that’d be it, haha! Ah! I know I talk like an emotionless android.  I get uncontrollably nervous when being put in front of the camera. Can’t stop moving, can’t stop staring holes in the air and I can’t apply the appropriate tone of voice when it’s needed just BECAUSE of that nervousness. However, all you get to see is the “calm” side of me and that’s boring. Well, regarding the video blogs – the less you hear the better. I’m too ashamed to even watch them again myself. That face that you see is not the face that I personally see (I guess everyone would say that if they see themselves in videos, except that I have a thousand faces…physically not metaphorically). I actually forgot to say that I didn’t want comments. That video is not about ME! It’s about how I intended to approach YOU. I’ve been searching for possibilities and opportunities to talk to you and to make YOU talk to me. Simply judging me, criticizing me won’t get us any further.  What matters is what’s beneath YOUR surface, and then we can get down to conversation. Usually I want to talk with people about something they don’t want to talk about. Whenever I bring it up, they’d change topic or just keep quiet. It’s alright if you shut me out once or twice, because you don’t feel like talking, but I won’t accept a third turn down; especially not if this friendship has lasted for over eight years. If you decide to go in the end, do it. I might start running after you once or twice, because you’ve been too selfish or coward to tell me it’s over, but this will not happen a third time.

Fuhgeddaboudit!

So instead of a 4000 word blog, you get the video blogs this year. Someone suggested I should do something like that weekly or monthly. – Uhm, no. Personal things are not something that appears from out of nowhere. You know perfectly well that emotions and thoughts develop time after time. Perception takes a while. I’m not a columnist or an entertainer, that’s something very different. Now you know Schopenhauer and I have a love-hate-thing going. In the last video blog I said I was grateful, which results that I DO care about things and people. Did you really believe a word in the rubbish that I had said previously? Oh…it doesn’t matter. You always believe what you want anyway. I totally forgot. It’d make no sense to me if you say that you can understand, I wouldn’t even care, unless you tell me the (w)hole story about you – then we shall see, shan’t we? Parents are usually the people who understand you the least of all and this either makes you the perfect kid or the total egoist. My mum thinks the second one fits best. I love her most anyhow, no matter what she says or does to me. And I will always hate myself for the way I am to her and that’s only because we don’t get along. She always says that she’s an aggressive monster herself and in the end she has created an even more aggressive one. Both of us know that we won’t ever be best friends, but this doesn’t mean anything bad.

I still haven’t drunk that bottle of Desperados. Yesterday I had to go to the chemist’s to buy medical tea to prevent a bladder/kidney infection. I can’t be bothered going to the doctor’s again. I’m sick of handing in my urine; I cannot piss into that tube without wetting my hand! I go all directions, not just one. Ahem.

Reading in the bathroom whilst my back is pressed against the radiator/dryer is wonderful. I liked my bathroom in Lübeck – comfy, equipped with beautiful halogene bulbs and a clean sink. Almost through with Stephen King’s autobiographical book “On writing”. It has opened my eyes. There is finally someone who is sincere enough to kick my butt and tell me to do something if I want to be a good writer. He’s not as stuck up as I thought he was. A man is a man when he is open enough to admit his mistakes, addictions and weaknesses. Courage is if he asks for help. This is how I like my men. I’m not going to go through someone else’s ego trip again. However, you are free to join my ride, but I will not pay for your ticket.

When I woke up in the hotel this morning, I was covered in HOT sweat. I guess it’s a good sign. I still felt sad, partly because in a few hours time I’d be leaving Lübeck and other than that I dreamt of an uncanny encounter with River Phoenix. We met in an American café (80s style). That dream was almost surreal, because it was definitely his voice speaking. I had never, in ANY dream, heard someone’s voice as clearly and loudly as his. He spoke through my soul, man! Unfortunately I cannot remember what he had said; all I know is that it wasn’t something pleasant, as I ended up walking out of the café sadly without looking back.

This is not much of a happy end, but my new start. Like last year after those 4000 words, I had settled with a new start. Epiphany’s been achieved. The new chapter may begin. Here.

Day 1 – First day in Lübeck

Day 2 – Introducing Ellen Parker

Day 3 – Last day

Random:

Bumble Bee (part one) – Lost

Bumble Bee (part two) – The fighter

Bumble Bee (part three) – Redemption

Half a stone