Waverly

I’d like to say "I’d never given it much thought before," because I like the way it sounds. It implies a sort of philosophical view and discovery: “I have not thought about it before, but now am willing to examine the full depth and beauty of this wonderful idea or thing and discover something that is ultimately life-changing.” But the truth is, I have. I’ve given it a lot more thought than would seem necessary to give a train station.

There are stagnant puddles that never seem to evaporate on the landings that break up the stairs to the rest of the town above. I am suspicious of these and avoid stepping in them, because the station smells slightly of urine, though I’ve never seen anyone pissing there and can’t imagine why anyone would.  To my knowledge, there are no homeless fellows that live down there; Belmont isn’t that kind of town. And since I have stood, on the platform, waiting, at 12:27 am, if there were any homeless people living there, I probably would have seen them. However, there is usually no one but me, or me and a friend who walked me there, and once or twice, me and a couple of teenagers makingout.

The conductors, of course, have a tendency to think that I was up to something, because there’s no good reason to be going home that late from Waverly to Kendal Green. And maybe rightly so, for it did gave me the independence a teenager from boring white suburbia wanted-a way to hang out with friends that lived a couple towns over, and a venue to photograph them, on the rooftop above the bench and stairs, at night. Fun, and maybe even possibly illegal (oh the thrill of barely doing anything wrong, ever!)

The walls are salmon pink, which is a much more interesting color than any of the other stations I get off at. Sometimes, if I stay the night and am waiting in the morning, I study the wall on my side of the tracks in greater detail: I can see the crackles, the orange sparks and red veins, and where the paint has been chipped away, the blue gray of the cement underneath.  On the opposite side, there are streaks of lighter pink (or…more accurately, they exist on both sides but I can see them more clearly from a distance,) formed from the greater flow of water due to the way the hand rail above is structured. The water collects on the metal rectangles, runs down to the corners, and washed down the wall. In two places this pattern is broken, where fresh paint has been applied to cover up graffiti. For a very long time it said “yoonder” on the left hand side of the station, underneath the road-bridge. More recently, in big letters, left to right, bottom down, above the roof that covers the stairs that go up, it said:

from     save

heaven me

                -which is one of those flexible things that can be interpreted by me for myself. I can think….here, this town, is my heaven. My haven from home, an accessible taste of independence for a person without a car, and here I am waiting for the train to save me from it and bring me to a good nights’ rest. Though somehow I seriously doubt that the writer meant anything like that.

                I don’t mind the drunk sports fans on some nights, but I do mind the throw up that is caused by them. I like eavesdropping on conversations, but I hate looking for a set of seats that’s empty and finding none. I don’t enjoy shelling out money to the conductor, but I like it when they don’t bother to come to collect the fare. The worst is though, when fresh snow is lying all around and still coming down, seeing the tracks are clean, and trying to convince myself that, maybe, perhaps, possibly, I have not missed the train, have not lost a sliver of independence, and don’t have to irritate my parents by asking them to disrupt their plans and pick me up after the last train has gone.That there is still a 'next train' coming to this pink, stinking platform.

Prompt One Margaret

Hallie's room couldn't have existed this way for more than I few months, but I only saw it in this one state. Her room was off the long hallway next to the staircase on the second floor. All along the wall were the Woodhead-Nutting's three daughters school photos. They grow before your eyes in a cheesing smile kind of way. Hallie's emotions ranged from angry to ecstatic, not in that order. Her door had a “Caution” sign that she took from a construction site.

Madeleine and Hayley had led me into her room with quiet voices. She was out, they didn't know where, they told me that it was not uncommon for her to disappear on weekends. Her door opened to, what seemed to my nine-year-old eyes, a pit of clothes. Piled up on her futon, flung on her desk and it's chair and all over the carpet. There were piles of books, some text books, some novels circling her bed and all along her walls. The air in her room was still, like her one window had never been opened and the central air had been blocked. The walls were light blue, but were covered in the ravings of a fourteen year old girl. Madeleine informed me this was so her parents would finally let her paint her walls a different color. Black sharpie sketched out curse words I'd never heard or seen before, mainly dealing with her parents, or her sisters. The sentences varied in size, in an arbitrary sense. Her fucks ranged from one inch to a foot tall. Hayley told me they'd read all her walls several times. The writing grew scarcer as I looked up the wall, eventually stopping at 6 feet up.

I only saw Hallie's room like that once. The few other times I went to Madeleine's house we didn't venture into that chamber, and by the time I was in high school they'd moved to a different neighborhood. I couldn't have stood in there more than ten minutes but the strong, unadulterated adolescence that was contained in those walls were a new idea for me. Anger being open was something I had never seen before. The fear of Hallie's return coupled with the dark urge to keep reading, was something that stuck with me. Like I find myself wanting to go into stranger's homes, not to steal anything, but to rifle through lives like a deck of cards.

Prompt One: Where

Describe a place. Tell us how it smells, looks, feels, is, how does time work there, what was the first or last time you where there, how did you discover it ect. Associations you have with it, emotions, memories. You can go in all or none of these veins. You can go on a tangent, but in the end, I want to know the place.

I believe this is to be posted by the 26th

TYPEWRITER & co.

The purpose of this blog is...to share writing, fulfill writing assignments and find motivation on dreary days, and not-so-dreary days as well. This part we know.

Now for the logistics:
Once a week I shall put up a writing assignment. By the end of the week you will put up the finished (or unfinished) work on the blog, with the title of the work as the name of the piece.
For organization purposes, you 'label' your work with name, the number of the assignment (written out i.e. 'one', it should pop up because the actual assignment will be tagged as such as well.)
Additionally, you will post the piece within that week, so that it will show up in the chronology in the side bar as that weeks piece. If you for some reason put it up late, you can open up 'post options' before you actually publish the post, and change the date to when it should have been published. This way you will be able to view all the pieces done for the assignment within the heading of one week on the sidebar.
If you have an idea for a prompt/assignment, you will contact me and I will put it up, just so that there they come up at a steady pace.

If you have any questions or comments, post them here or contact me by phone/e-mail/facebook.

and yes: you will. and you will enjoy it too.


edit: the purpose of the labels is that you can click on them and find all the correlating posts. So if you click on the word "prompt" all the prompts will come up, the word "one" all the posts for the first prompt will come up, and the prompt itself, the name "Margaret" all of Margaret's pieces will come up.
which means that a piece that is not a prompt should not have the word prompt in the label, but that otherwise you are free to label things as you like.

2ble edit: I don't know if it's just that no one has names for their pieces, but you can call them something and put it as the title.