Writing Club: First Meeting

Lesson: Write about what you know.

"Your stories are your stories. They're the ones you can really tell, and if you try telling ones the world would like you to tell, you'll do it badly." -Dorothy Allison

Tonight's writing club had 7 participants and we spent time making brainstorm maps to write down all the things we know about.

We created 4 maps about things we have experienced and know about.

• Who am I?
• Places
• Conflicts
• People

Then we picked something from the maps to write about. Students wrote about a wonderful guy who finds a girlfriend and then forgets his friends, a drunk father, a mother who had disappeared because she was sick, the optimistic feelings of a freshman, the hollowness of the heart of being a senior, and the ugliness of a campus made beautiful by the people who fill it.

In my Who am I? map, I wrote the concept adoption which lead to the thought alone.

The following is what I wrote at tonight's writing club.

I may be surrounded by people.
I may have a family, friends, students, and co-workers.
I may even have a lover or two.

But if you really want to know the truth,
I am alone in this world of a billion people.
What do you mean alone?
Yeah....
What do I mean?

I don't feel lonely.
I don't feel sad or sorry for myself.
I don't feel hurt, depressed, or angry.

I just feel alone.

I am 32 years old and have passed year after year meeting friend after friend, enemy after enemy, lover after lover, thousands of people have passed through my eyes, through my life, and here I stand alone, forgotten, a memory from the past, an empty in-box reflecting all those connections lost to the passing of time.

I sit here surrounded by you, and you, and you,
all of you
and in a few months time
poof
gone
boarding a plane to another land
with only a suitcase of memories.

Alone again.
Alone now.
Alone then.

I stand here
as an individual
somehow unconnected to my past
unconnected to my ancestors
unconnected to people.

In this moment,
this one,
this one right now
this one single second
even surrounded by people

I am alone.

How can that be?

I don't know how to explain it but I feel like that forgotten memory of your mother's smile when you were born.

Forgotten.

You will forget me
And once again I'll be alone
alone as I am today
alone as I have always been.