Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 25.1: May 9th, 2010
"Caramel Kisses" is an unfinished novel I began to write back in 2009 and stopped working on in 2010. The two main characters - Adriana Maguire Reynard and Emma Burking - would ultimately be revised for my later completed novella, "The Liffey Is Half-Asleep," in 2011. Several elements of "Liffey" can be found in their original forms in "Caramel Kisses," such as the characters' names, the haiku scene, and Adriana's penchant for writing.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Eleven
by Belinda Roddie
I spent another night wide awake, pondering, secluded in the August heat rolling through the bedroom window and keeping my head heavy on top of my neck. I drew my knees up to my chin, damp skin against damp skin. My hair lay in a tangled knot on my head, and I involuntarily reminisced, like it was a knee-jerk reaction. Or a sharp kick to the skull.
I remembered my very first kiss in detail; it was with a man I did not love. He was a nice enough guy, intelligent book wise but not the sharpest tack in the drawer. He was Chinese and had a stereotypical lisp that you’d hear in the movies from the stereotypically geeky character that either somehow became cool and popular after an extraordinary destruction of his character, or just became comic fodder for the prettier, less intellectually sound protagonists. And he was a geek, as lovable as a geek could be who made Gundam Wing models in his spare time. A friend, not a lover.
He took me to homecoming when I was fourteen, and I told him I loved him. For me, it was all about the drama of it – I was beginning to first develop my playwright psyche and I thought, let’s create a theatrical scene, shall we? Let’s have the lights come up, the curtain be yanked aside as it tumbled in rolls across the stage. It can be onstage or on camera, I don’t care, as long as it’s something the viewers can look on with a sense of fondness – or perhaps a note of disgust. I expected a musical crescendo out of this, a sudden burst of life within me, the realization that my life was something worth writing about in a story. Anything.
Instead, it was awkward. His kiss was awkward and his nuzzling of his fuzzy head against my shoulder was awkward and his words of love were awkward. It was all awkward. And it didn’t help that the typical Avril Lavigne tribute of 2004 was being blasted from the high school gym and I felt this strange feeling in my chest like my heart had fallen asleep and gotten the pins and needles, as if it were a foot, not a pump. So I shied away from him as soon as possible, told him I wasn’t ready and that I was in the heat of the moment and that I had to take things slowly. I bet I ruined his night and made him miserable.
That was one concept thrown in the waste bin, along with several of my actual creative writing ideas. Next was my official boyfriend: Simon Frasier, a senior at the time, a TA in one of my classes. I thought I loved him. I really did. We shared a similar wit, a certain verbal tang on our tongues, and we talked about the “important” things in life like politics, old fads, and siblings. Simon had been a major pothead in his high school career, one of the notorious ones, and he told me he cut down just for me. Then he was on ecstasy while we were driving to the bowling alley and I felt like there were some things he just couldn’t be honest about.
But we dated anyway. The first movie we saw together was a Quentin Tarantino film, a good one. We were nestled up on the couch with popcorn and glasses of water and we hugged and that was as far as we got for a while. And then Simon asked to come upstairs with me, where as we played video games he confessed his feelings for me. And with the soundtrack of the game’s villain playing in the background, I couldn’t help but wonder why it had seemed so perfect at the time. We kissed, and I liked it. Even if only because of the technique and the fact that he was better at it than the last guy.
Simon took me to prom, and I wore a red dress that was becoming of my body but not my attitude. He took me out to burgers constantly, to lecture me on my poor bowling skills at the alley and play pool with me with an old jukebox being played by other customers. We played Time Crisis games together, arcade games of all varieties, and we’d roll over to his house and sit on his bed and he’d ask me, over and over again. C’mon, he’d say. It can’t hurt. You gotta try it at some point. C’mon, just give me something.
I wouldn’t budge. I was mired in premature thoughts of the concept, frozen as if suspended in time in which I couldn’t even fathom the words. I was naïve, and I wasn’t ready. Simon sat there, and I could almost feel his blood pumping through him, the adrenaline zipping from his head to his crotch, straight to the thing he wanted to show off to me. I wasn’t ready for him, but then again, I wasn’t ready for anything. I could only dumbly shake my head, apologize, and ask for another kiss. Please let that make up for it, I thought. Please, let it make up for the fact that I’m such a fucking prude.
We mutually broke up after five months of dating. He was shipped off to San Francisco and found a discount girlfriend two months later. I didn’t mind. I was busy writing and interacting with my obligatory high school buddies, moving to the stage where Simon could never imagine me to be. He thought I wasn’t the dramatic type, but he didn’t know that he had offered more drama to me than I had ever asked for.
If the first boy I dated had given me a dead fuse, then Simon had given me a broken faucet with the water gushing out in dark torrents. He gave me a drama close to a soap opera because all we needed was me to break down sobbing and him to scream at me, holding a burning joint between his stained fingers. We needed a piano playing in a minor key and the slow close-ups of our red-rimmed eyes, only for me the red would be from the tears and for him it’d be from the smoke.
It now occurred to me, as I went searching for something to give my life a theatrical purpose, that I was sifting through an attic full of dust only to find the drama behind me, tucked away in a box. The truth was, my life was already a drama, an inner drama. The sort of emotional story that in the past was eating away at the fibers of my mind and I just didn’t realize at the time just how much of a crevasse it was leaving in me. I looked back on the scrapbooks of my memory, the mental diaries, and there it was. The fascinations, the infatuations, any other word ending with “ation” would suffice. My curiosities were all jumbled together in a cardboard box, covered in cobwebs up in that attic, all the things I thought “normal” romance would give me. But normal wasn’t in this particular script. Whoever was responsible for it, had it been me or the great playwright in the sky, hadn’t bothered to use it in his or her vocabulary.
My whole life had been something in which I could have seen symbolized in characters more suited for moral plays. My emotions could have been embodied by starkly clothed actors, my environment cast among painted plywood scenery. It didn’t take either of the boys I had connected with as an allegedly stable, hormonally functioning high schooler to find the drama. Of course, as I remembered all of this, I knew without even delving too deeply that I was still playing a role in that particular drama. And as I turned on my side to see the peacefully sleeping girl nestled beside me, I could only guess that she was a lead role in this whole performance. The playwrights perched on their pedestals would be so proud of me.
I guessed that I would be the actor and the writer after all, as Emma said. And I wondered if I would be so until the day I died and they wrote the closing line and curtain call on the carved epitaph on my literarily customized tombstone.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Eleven
by Belinda Roddie
I spent another night wide awake, pondering, secluded in the August heat rolling through the bedroom window and keeping my head heavy on top of my neck. I drew my knees up to my chin, damp skin against damp skin. My hair lay in a tangled knot on my head, and I involuntarily reminisced, like it was a knee-jerk reaction. Or a sharp kick to the skull.
I remembered my very first kiss in detail; it was with a man I did not love. He was a nice enough guy, intelligent book wise but not the sharpest tack in the drawer. He was Chinese and had a stereotypical lisp that you’d hear in the movies from the stereotypically geeky character that either somehow became cool and popular after an extraordinary destruction of his character, or just became comic fodder for the prettier, less intellectually sound protagonists. And he was a geek, as lovable as a geek could be who made Gundam Wing models in his spare time. A friend, not a lover.
He took me to homecoming when I was fourteen, and I told him I loved him. For me, it was all about the drama of it – I was beginning to first develop my playwright psyche and I thought, let’s create a theatrical scene, shall we? Let’s have the lights come up, the curtain be yanked aside as it tumbled in rolls across the stage. It can be onstage or on camera, I don’t care, as long as it’s something the viewers can look on with a sense of fondness – or perhaps a note of disgust. I expected a musical crescendo out of this, a sudden burst of life within me, the realization that my life was something worth writing about in a story. Anything.
Instead, it was awkward. His kiss was awkward and his nuzzling of his fuzzy head against my shoulder was awkward and his words of love were awkward. It was all awkward. And it didn’t help that the typical Avril Lavigne tribute of 2004 was being blasted from the high school gym and I felt this strange feeling in my chest like my heart had fallen asleep and gotten the pins and needles, as if it were a foot, not a pump. So I shied away from him as soon as possible, told him I wasn’t ready and that I was in the heat of the moment and that I had to take things slowly. I bet I ruined his night and made him miserable.
That was one concept thrown in the waste bin, along with several of my actual creative writing ideas. Next was my official boyfriend: Simon Frasier, a senior at the time, a TA in one of my classes. I thought I loved him. I really did. We shared a similar wit, a certain verbal tang on our tongues, and we talked about the “important” things in life like politics, old fads, and siblings. Simon had been a major pothead in his high school career, one of the notorious ones, and he told me he cut down just for me. Then he was on ecstasy while we were driving to the bowling alley and I felt like there were some things he just couldn’t be honest about.
But we dated anyway. The first movie we saw together was a Quentin Tarantino film, a good one. We were nestled up on the couch with popcorn and glasses of water and we hugged and that was as far as we got for a while. And then Simon asked to come upstairs with me, where as we played video games he confessed his feelings for me. And with the soundtrack of the game’s villain playing in the background, I couldn’t help but wonder why it had seemed so perfect at the time. We kissed, and I liked it. Even if only because of the technique and the fact that he was better at it than the last guy.
Simon took me to prom, and I wore a red dress that was becoming of my body but not my attitude. He took me out to burgers constantly, to lecture me on my poor bowling skills at the alley and play pool with me with an old jukebox being played by other customers. We played Time Crisis games together, arcade games of all varieties, and we’d roll over to his house and sit on his bed and he’d ask me, over and over again. C’mon, he’d say. It can’t hurt. You gotta try it at some point. C’mon, just give me something.
I wouldn’t budge. I was mired in premature thoughts of the concept, frozen as if suspended in time in which I couldn’t even fathom the words. I was naïve, and I wasn’t ready. Simon sat there, and I could almost feel his blood pumping through him, the adrenaline zipping from his head to his crotch, straight to the thing he wanted to show off to me. I wasn’t ready for him, but then again, I wasn’t ready for anything. I could only dumbly shake my head, apologize, and ask for another kiss. Please let that make up for it, I thought. Please, let it make up for the fact that I’m such a fucking prude.
We mutually broke up after five months of dating. He was shipped off to San Francisco and found a discount girlfriend two months later. I didn’t mind. I was busy writing and interacting with my obligatory high school buddies, moving to the stage where Simon could never imagine me to be. He thought I wasn’t the dramatic type, but he didn’t know that he had offered more drama to me than I had ever asked for.
If the first boy I dated had given me a dead fuse, then Simon had given me a broken faucet with the water gushing out in dark torrents. He gave me a drama close to a soap opera because all we needed was me to break down sobbing and him to scream at me, holding a burning joint between his stained fingers. We needed a piano playing in a minor key and the slow close-ups of our red-rimmed eyes, only for me the red would be from the tears and for him it’d be from the smoke.
It now occurred to me, as I went searching for something to give my life a theatrical purpose, that I was sifting through an attic full of dust only to find the drama behind me, tucked away in a box. The truth was, my life was already a drama, an inner drama. The sort of emotional story that in the past was eating away at the fibers of my mind and I just didn’t realize at the time just how much of a crevasse it was leaving in me. I looked back on the scrapbooks of my memory, the mental diaries, and there it was. The fascinations, the infatuations, any other word ending with “ation” would suffice. My curiosities were all jumbled together in a cardboard box, covered in cobwebs up in that attic, all the things I thought “normal” romance would give me. But normal wasn’t in this particular script. Whoever was responsible for it, had it been me or the great playwright in the sky, hadn’t bothered to use it in his or her vocabulary.
My whole life had been something in which I could have seen symbolized in characters more suited for moral plays. My emotions could have been embodied by starkly clothed actors, my environment cast among painted plywood scenery. It didn’t take either of the boys I had connected with as an allegedly stable, hormonally functioning high schooler to find the drama. Of course, as I remembered all of this, I knew without even delving too deeply that I was still playing a role in that particular drama. And as I turned on my side to see the peacefully sleeping girl nestled beside me, I could only guess that she was a lead role in this whole performance. The playwrights perched on their pedestals would be so proud of me.
I guessed that I would be the actor and the writer after all, as Emma said. And I wondered if I would be so until the day I died and they wrote the closing line and curtain call on the carved epitaph on my literarily customized tombstone.
The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since May 9th, 2010.
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