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more of this Asteroid City thing that's been pinging around in my brain like a screensaver... I have a loose idea now for the emotional arc of this and the direction I'm gonna go, but for now, here's what I have!
I often get really insecure about my writing since I seem to return to the same comfortable writing style over and over, and I'm not sure if it ever really works or if I ever successfully nail the emotion and feeling I'm trying to convey, but I had a friend look over an earlier version of this and they liked it! I also think it's pretty obvious just from my writing style that I was deeply invested in both Homestuck and various Wes Anderson movies at different points in my life... this is something that I simply cannot help. reading Homestuck during your developmental years does something irreversible to your frontal lobe. just how it is.
speaking of, it's about time I reread homestuck again....
Act I, scenes i-iii
You are a fictional, young actress, playing a fictional young character in a fictional and, some could say young, play. You, as an actress, do not have a name. You, within the play, have a name mentioned once and never again, slipped neatly in with your siblings - sometimes to the point where they all blur together into a long singular name. AndromeCassioDoraWoodrow. Perhaps you're Andromeda, perhaps Cassiopeia, perhaps Pandora. The three of you are used interchangeably, anyway. In the play, that is. As an actress you bear no relation to any of the other young actors. Each of you go off at the end of rehearsals to your own separate lives and promptly cease to exist. The lights grow dimmer the farther you go and until you return to set it is only an inky grey nothingness, a time without time, an expanse without feeling. You don't understand all of this just yet, though.
So who do you think you are?
In the moment you are Andromeda. Cassiopeia, Pandora. It feels real, at the very least. The bright sharp heat of the saturated desert stings your reddened cheeks as you clamber the 40'x24' expanse of wilderness and dry red dust (shaved orange and red chalk, sometimes dampened with baby oil to clump on props correctly). The family car has just broken down, been towed to the nearest mechanic's shop and deposited, along with the five of you, across the street from the accommodations provided for your brother's award ceremony. You feel this to be truth. Reality. You are the first to arrive, if the complete absence of people and cars are any indication, and it feels for all the world like it will remain that way forever. Five sweltering silhouettes dotting the technicolor sun-drenched landscape. The sky, a blue so vibrant it hurts your eyes, collapses down against the flat horizon with unrelenting weight, compressing the landscape with a heaviness that you can feel even now, turned loose to wander and play. Your hands are small as they inspect every last inch of unexplored territory between the cracks of the shop. Dust dampened with oil residue builds in the crown molding of the front façade(tempera paint, watered down with linseed oil for proper oily sheen), beating out even the sand that strips everything else down little by little, year by year. The rest of the world is covered in the creeping orange spread of rust (tempera paint, again, with craft sand mixed in and a little bit of Elmer's glue), one of your favorite textures. You run your palm down the body of a bright teal scrap car and feel every piece of grit and dirt as it slides off the car and sticks in the wrinkles of your hand.
The others talk in heightened words above your head. Heads. Whatever. Things about car parts and script changes and the boring adult stuff you've long since learned to tune out. It's the same in any setting - under the glare of the lights and the color and the sound, or in the grey-black expanse of beams and wires (are you supposed to remember that just yet?) - everyone speaks above you. The words travel through an unseeable track just out of your curious fingers' reach. There was a time when you grasped for it, desperately, attempting to wrest meaning from the tangle of words as they spill from their neat designated track into a jumbled pile in your mind, but it only ever ended with frustration from everybody involved. With the unrelenting stubbornness only a young girl could have you kept trying, siphoning words like *Chemotherapy* and *understudy,* *Episcopalian* and *anticlimax,* but the harder you tried to put them in order, the more desperately you clung to the desire to understand, the worse it hurt. There was, but now there isn't. You're there, but now you're here. In time, you learned to listen when and only when they talk at you, and let the winding tracks of their other conversations flit by without much notice.
It would all feel terribly lonely were it not for your sisters. In a sense, they are you. You are a part of a whole that would crumble with even a single piece missing. The adults know that they speak in words above your heads, but what they seem to have forgotten in the years since they've grown is that you speak outside of their reach as well - the winding intricate tunnels of a language all your own binding the three of you together, low enough that they could never reach it, though the understanding you have means they would never parse what they heard, even if they put in the effort to pick it up and listen to it. For years you have existed - you know this to be true, though attempting to reach any farther back in time in your memory than about a month ago only returns a blurry haze of grey - and for years you will continue (presumably), leaning only on each other. Even Woodrow, bonded though you are, cannot understand. Doesn't try to, either, to his credit. He knows himself as smart and knowing, and admitting he doesn't know something would shatter the paper-thin image his entire existence relies on. So he sticks to his little journal, speaks like an adult while walking like a child, and remains forever separated by an inch and a half from the rest of the cast. From the rest of the family. From the rest of the cast. You ache for him sometimes, during the quieter moments on set. But you cannot ache forever. In that wordless language you and your sisters share you decide to explore the gas pumps aside the mechanic's, and Woodrow(Understudy(Jake Ryan)) and Dad(Augie Steenbeck(Jones Hall(Jason Schwarzmann))) exchange some words in that high-up language, and all of you drift just that little bit farther apart. After a while Dad-Augie-Jones-Jason calls all of you to join him, and you gather together like worshippers, heads bent under the hot sun just between two rows of small pristine white cabins (one burnt to the ground, aside it a slipshod tent) as he produces from his luggage a small circular Tupperware.
"I didn't know what to do. The time was never right," he says.
He is reading from a script. The script was in his hand but it isn't anymore. He is speaking from his heart and his gut and his guilt. Woodrow looks sorrowful, but calm. Accepting. You think you are beginning to understand. You feel your sisters' discontent at the processing of new knowledge, and the feeling resonates within you as well - what did he mean the time was never right? What use did he have of time, anyway? Without knowing the name of it, your body begins to feel grief. It sears under the skin and crushes the organs beneath the flesh and muscle and bones, as if you are slowly imploding, a buildup of pressure around you and a vacuum inside, sucking in the rest of the world in a desperate, clawing hunger. It hurts. It hurts, it hurts.
"When is she coming back?" one of you says.
Maybe it was you who said it. Maybe another. The question sits heavy in each of your mouths, anyway, one would have said it if the other hadn't. You had heard the word before but never so close. Your mother is dead. Your mother is gone. She got too sick. She isn't in the stars, she's in the ground. You conjure up loosely-bound memories of stained glass and wooden pews, trying to recall what was said about where you go when you die and ephemeral images of white-winged women with billowing dresses flit by, ascending to the clouds one by one to join a man with a halo of pure light for a head. Poppy(Stanley Zak(Tom Hanks)) told you about them, you think. You remember his smell but not his face. You try to remember your mother.
Inside Woodrow's shirt pocket, a folded print is kept with something less than care. The photo paper wrinkles and crumbles where the folds bisect it. The edges are bent and fraying. It's thinner than it once was, worn down molecule by molecule. Your mother sits ephemeral there - perfect, beautiful, dead. She's been in the picture the whole time. She's been dead from the start. You know this isn't true but you also think it may be. Your mother is everywhere, but nowhere at the same time, haunting each word without ever being seen. Did she ever have a name? Did you ever ask? Trying to think of her at any other time comes up blank, empty, a crisp unused sheet of paper on a worn wooden desk. You remember stories of her more than her own self. Nineteen years old, smoking a cigarette in a bathing suit reading a book on a New York fire escape waiting to be seen by someone else. Waiting for the world to happen to her. None of you fully understood what Dad(AugieJonesJason) meant by that, but he said at the time that you'd understand when you were older. That was a week ago, you think. It was sixty-two hundred hours ago, Pandora insists. Both feel plausible
"That's not your fault," he replies. He thinks he understands time, the passage of it. He thinks you don't.
You are turned loose with startling speed. The kind lady at the diner gives all of you fancy ice creams (powdered sugar and vanilla frosting) done up with wafers and bright red cherries and drizzles of chocolate sauce(plastic, paper and food dye), held in heavy glass cups with the flared bases and thin stems you aren't normally allowed to hold. You sit outside and feel the heat try and fail to melt it out of your hands. Inside, through the open window, you hear a conversation unravel - adult words, above your head. Music drifts from somewhere far away. Down the road a car chase speeds by, the wailing of a siren and popping of guns filling your ears until they drive beyond the glare of the lights and you can no longer see them.
I still don't understand the play, you think, though you won't know what that means until later. Your ice cream sits uneaten in the sand.
I often get really insecure about my writing since I seem to return to the same comfortable writing style over and over, and I'm not sure if it ever really works or if I ever successfully nail the emotion and feeling I'm trying to convey, but I had a friend look over an earlier version of this and they liked it! I also think it's pretty obvious just from my writing style that I was deeply invested in both Homestuck and various Wes Anderson movies at different points in my life... this is something that I simply cannot help. reading Homestuck during your developmental years does something irreversible to your frontal lobe. just how it is.
speaking of, it's about time I reread homestuck again....
Act I, scenes i-iii
You are a fictional, young actress, playing a fictional young character in a fictional and, some could say young, play. You, as an actress, do not have a name. You, within the play, have a name mentioned once and never again, slipped neatly in with your siblings - sometimes to the point where they all blur together into a long singular name. AndromeCassioDoraWoodrow. Perhaps you're Andromeda, perhaps Cassiopeia, perhaps Pandora. The three of you are used interchangeably, anyway. In the play, that is. As an actress you bear no relation to any of the other young actors. Each of you go off at the end of rehearsals to your own separate lives and promptly cease to exist. The lights grow dimmer the farther you go and until you return to set it is only an inky grey nothingness, a time without time, an expanse without feeling. You don't understand all of this just yet, though.
So who do you think you are?
In the moment you are Andromeda. Cassiopeia, Pandora. It feels real, at the very least. The bright sharp heat of the saturated desert stings your reddened cheeks as you clamber the 40'x24' expanse of wilderness and dry red dust (shaved orange and red chalk, sometimes dampened with baby oil to clump on props correctly). The family car has just broken down, been towed to the nearest mechanic's shop and deposited, along with the five of you, across the street from the accommodations provided for your brother's award ceremony. You feel this to be truth. Reality. You are the first to arrive, if the complete absence of people and cars are any indication, and it feels for all the world like it will remain that way forever. Five sweltering silhouettes dotting the technicolor sun-drenched landscape. The sky, a blue so vibrant it hurts your eyes, collapses down against the flat horizon with unrelenting weight, compressing the landscape with a heaviness that you can feel even now, turned loose to wander and play. Your hands are small as they inspect every last inch of unexplored territory between the cracks of the shop. Dust dampened with oil residue builds in the crown molding of the front façade(tempera paint, watered down with linseed oil for proper oily sheen), beating out even the sand that strips everything else down little by little, year by year. The rest of the world is covered in the creeping orange spread of rust (tempera paint, again, with craft sand mixed in and a little bit of Elmer's glue), one of your favorite textures. You run your palm down the body of a bright teal scrap car and feel every piece of grit and dirt as it slides off the car and sticks in the wrinkles of your hand.
The others talk in heightened words above your head. Heads. Whatever. Things about car parts and script changes and the boring adult stuff you've long since learned to tune out. It's the same in any setting - under the glare of the lights and the color and the sound, or in the grey-black expanse of beams and wires (are you supposed to remember that just yet?) - everyone speaks above you. The words travel through an unseeable track just out of your curious fingers' reach. There was a time when you grasped for it, desperately, attempting to wrest meaning from the tangle of words as they spill from their neat designated track into a jumbled pile in your mind, but it only ever ended with frustration from everybody involved. With the unrelenting stubbornness only a young girl could have you kept trying, siphoning words like *Chemotherapy* and *understudy,* *Episcopalian* and *anticlimax,* but the harder you tried to put them in order, the more desperately you clung to the desire to understand, the worse it hurt. There was, but now there isn't. You're there, but now you're here. In time, you learned to listen when and only when they talk at you, and let the winding tracks of their other conversations flit by without much notice.
It would all feel terribly lonely were it not for your sisters. In a sense, they are you. You are a part of a whole that would crumble with even a single piece missing. The adults know that they speak in words above your heads, but what they seem to have forgotten in the years since they've grown is that you speak outside of their reach as well - the winding intricate tunnels of a language all your own binding the three of you together, low enough that they could never reach it, though the understanding you have means they would never parse what they heard, even if they put in the effort to pick it up and listen to it. For years you have existed - you know this to be true, though attempting to reach any farther back in time in your memory than about a month ago only returns a blurry haze of grey - and for years you will continue (presumably), leaning only on each other. Even Woodrow, bonded though you are, cannot understand. Doesn't try to, either, to his credit. He knows himself as smart and knowing, and admitting he doesn't know something would shatter the paper-thin image his entire existence relies on. So he sticks to his little journal, speaks like an adult while walking like a child, and remains forever separated by an inch and a half from the rest of the cast. From the rest of the family. From the rest of the cast. You ache for him sometimes, during the quieter moments on set. But you cannot ache forever. In that wordless language you and your sisters share you decide to explore the gas pumps aside the mechanic's, and Woodrow(Understudy(Jake Ryan)) and Dad(Augie Steenbeck(Jones Hall(Jason Schwarzmann))) exchange some words in that high-up language, and all of you drift just that little bit farther apart. After a while Dad-Augie-Jones-Jason calls all of you to join him, and you gather together like worshippers, heads bent under the hot sun just between two rows of small pristine white cabins (one burnt to the ground, aside it a slipshod tent) as he produces from his luggage a small circular Tupperware.
"I didn't know what to do. The time was never right," he says.
He is reading from a script. The script was in his hand but it isn't anymore. He is speaking from his heart and his gut and his guilt. Woodrow looks sorrowful, but calm. Accepting. You think you are beginning to understand. You feel your sisters' discontent at the processing of new knowledge, and the feeling resonates within you as well - what did he mean the time was never right? What use did he have of time, anyway? Without knowing the name of it, your body begins to feel grief. It sears under the skin and crushes the organs beneath the flesh and muscle and bones, as if you are slowly imploding, a buildup of pressure around you and a vacuum inside, sucking in the rest of the world in a desperate, clawing hunger. It hurts. It hurts, it hurts.
"When is she coming back?" one of you says.
Maybe it was you who said it. Maybe another. The question sits heavy in each of your mouths, anyway, one would have said it if the other hadn't. You had heard the word before but never so close. Your mother is dead. Your mother is gone. She got too sick. She isn't in the stars, she's in the ground. You conjure up loosely-bound memories of stained glass and wooden pews, trying to recall what was said about where you go when you die and ephemeral images of white-winged women with billowing dresses flit by, ascending to the clouds one by one to join a man with a halo of pure light for a head. Poppy(Stanley Zak(Tom Hanks)) told you about them, you think. You remember his smell but not his face. You try to remember your mother.
Inside Woodrow's shirt pocket, a folded print is kept with something less than care. The photo paper wrinkles and crumbles where the folds bisect it. The edges are bent and fraying. It's thinner than it once was, worn down molecule by molecule. Your mother sits ephemeral there - perfect, beautiful, dead. She's been in the picture the whole time. She's been dead from the start. You know this isn't true but you also think it may be. Your mother is everywhere, but nowhere at the same time, haunting each word without ever being seen. Did she ever have a name? Did you ever ask? Trying to think of her at any other time comes up blank, empty, a crisp unused sheet of paper on a worn wooden desk. You remember stories of her more than her own self. Nineteen years old, smoking a cigarette in a bathing suit reading a book on a New York fire escape waiting to be seen by someone else. Waiting for the world to happen to her. None of you fully understood what Dad(AugieJonesJason) meant by that, but he said at the time that you'd understand when you were older. That was a week ago, you think. It was sixty-two hundred hours ago, Pandora insists. Both feel plausible
"That's not your fault," he replies. He thinks he understands time, the passage of it. He thinks you don't.
You are turned loose with startling speed. The kind lady at the diner gives all of you fancy ice creams (powdered sugar and vanilla frosting) done up with wafers and bright red cherries and drizzles of chocolate sauce(plastic, paper and food dye), held in heavy glass cups with the flared bases and thin stems you aren't normally allowed to hold. You sit outside and feel the heat try and fail to melt it out of your hands. Inside, through the open window, you hear a conversation unravel - adult words, above your head. Music drifts from somewhere far away. Down the road a car chase speeds by, the wailing of a siren and popping of guns filling your ears until they drive beyond the glare of the lights and you can no longer see them.
I still don't understand the play, you think, though you won't know what that means until later. Your ice cream sits uneaten in the sand.
