Persephone Winter, Part 2

I can smell the diesel fumes and dust as the bus clears away from the entrance of our driveway. The walk is around a quarter of a mile, but the bus doesn’t have a place to turn around if it went to my doorstep, which is fine by me.  We have too much junk in our yard anyways.

Bobby wants to hold my hand as we walk to our house, and I let him.  His backpack is no longer bigger than he is, and he’s starting to discover girls.  Girls are apparently discovering him, but neither are quite sure what to do about it.  I know it won’t be long before he’ll stop holding my hand when we walk up to our house.  Nowadays he waits for the bus to drive away before he reaches for it.

“C’mon little fish,” I tell him.  He smiles up at me and begins skipping along, kicking the rocks with his dust-encased shoes.  “How was school today?”

“Good,” he says, breathless as he tries to keep up with my long steps, the steep climb, and sending the random bits of gravel left and right.  “Liam and I played handball and four square during gym. Rebecca and Joey played with us too. Ms. Griggs is teaching us how to divide fractions now too.”

He continues to chatter on like this, talking about the trading card games he played during lunch and before school, the stories he’s reading in language arts, convection currents running along the Earth’s mantle and how Hawaii is just a hotspot that’s moving below the lithosphere. I try to remember this moment, trying to file it away among the other moments that I have shared with him, knowing that they’ll smudge into this blurred mural of my memory, and echo of when Dad used to do this for me too. If he ever cared about me like I do for Bobby, then he never shows it. I know that I won’t be like him when I get out and find a husband.  If I find a husband.

Our driveway flattens out and it is a straight sprint to our front porch from here.  Bobby sees our Dad step out onto our front porch, and that’s when my brother lets go of my hand and bolts for our father.  Dad smiles, and crouches down, his arms spread wide as Bobby plunges through the tall grass and ascends our creaking steps.

Dad’s got the timeless facial features of Richard Gere.  A full head of completely white hair.  Clear and taunt skin.  No wrinkles around his eyes, but his grin reaches up to coax them out every once and a while.  I don’t know how old he is, but he’s been around for a while.  He sweeps Bobby up as my little brother giggles and screams.  I follow behind, arms across my chest, before I brush the bark of our birch tree in a silent thank you.  I can feel her branches wave and sway in response.  I want to get rid of the moss that is growing up her trunk, but she won’t let me.  She’s too kind sometimes.

We’re all eco-friendly at our house.  Solar panels on the roof. Windmills out back.  Dad doesn’t work, not in the traditional white-collar/blue collar way, but he helps with research for his friends and keeps the house, mostly. I keep the garden out back, growing our fruits and vegetables and maintaining our compost heap.  I make dinner most nights, unless Dad orders out for pizza.  Bobby mostly just plays, but Dad’s got him to help me out from time to time, along with beating back the jungle which is our front lawn.  Don’t know why Dad won’t do it himself.

“Ha ha! Hello little fish!” says our Dad, bouncing Bobby on his hip.  “Whoa, you’re getting too big for this!”  He sits my brother down, and turns to address me as I’m leaning against our tree.

“And how’s our Miss Sulky and Surly?”

Persephone Winter, Part 1

I’ve been seriously contemplating using toothpicks to prop my eyelids open.  The splinters would hurt terribly, true, but at least I’d be awake for math class.  Bobby’s got a better mind for this stuff, but he’s in middle school, and the stuff I’m working on is bit over his head.

Bobby’s my baby brother.  Half-brother, actually.  Same dad, different mom.  Dad doesn’t talk much about any of his past “conquests” in front of us, but Grandma made a comment about Bobby’s mother once.  We were sitting in the kitchen, and I was barely three days past fourteen.  Bobby was on her knee, bouncing him around.  She covered his ears before she said it.  It went something along the lines of “Oh Rusty, we all know that she was just a piece of tail.”

Apparently Bobby’s mom was a water nymph, and when dad has all of his warlock friends over for beers and football, and he thinks I’m asleep in my room, he often uses the phrase “furious copulation” when his buddies ask about her.  Cue the drunken laughter. 

I want to cover my ears when he talks about her, to press the sides of my head so hard that I could push that memory out, but I don’t.  I keep hoping, and keep waiting, that maybe one night, one of his buddies will ask about my mom, and Dad’ll at least say her name.

Today, though, is remedial math and trying to chart parabolas.  As it stands now, I’ll have to take summer school to catch up to junior year.  I’m alright at astronomy, but I do much better at biology.  It just… makes sense.  I was grateful that the school system didn’t have enough funds to make us dissect anything this year.  I can’t stand the thought of hurting any of those poor things.  Can you imagine your entire life’s purpose is to be bred so that you could be suffocated and drowned in your own lungs, and then cut open for bored and slightly nauseas sixteen-year olds to see?

I take my glasses off and try to rub the tears of boredom out of my eyes.  I watch as the teacher punches in random numbers into an elaborate string of numbers, parenthesis, and letters, before settling on swirling a miniature dot on the makeshift graph she drew on the board.  I dutifully copy the location of her orange dot on my graph paper.  I silently pray that I’ll be able to figure it out when I get home.

Grandma gave me these glasses.  Around the time I hit my first period, anything made out of metal or plastic gave me an allergic reaction.  That includes plastic or metal frames.  When I woke up the next morning, I put my glasses on as usual and within minutes I had a rash around my face exactly where the frames pressed.

I tried to convince Dad that I couldn’t show up to school like that.  He listened to me patiently, but at the end of my stormy tirade he handed me my backpack, and told me that if I’m embarrassed now, showing up to the bus looking like I had just cried would be worse.  The next three days I sat in the front rows of my classes and squinted at the boards and projectors.

Grandma finally showed up, and she asked our birch tree in the front yard to weave a set of wooden frames for me.  Dad popped the lenses out of my old frames, and the birch encircled some of herself around them, and gave me flexible, willowy frames.  Or should I say birchy?  She’s a nice tree.  I try to keep her pruned and clear out the undergrowth for her.

“Stephanie?” says the teacher. 

I close my eyes.  Please mean Stephanie Hill.  Please mean Stephanie Hill.

“Stephanie Winter?”

Craaaaaap.

“Yes?”

“Could you please demonstrate on the board where we should chart the next point?”

My chair legs scrap against the tiled floor as I stand up and approach the board.  Just another boring day.

My First Rejection Letter

A couple weeks ago I recieved my first rejection letter.

Now to some, that would be crushingly bad for one's ego.  For me, it is just an indicator that I'm on the correct path.

I recently (re)watched a vlogbrothers video that guest starred Maureen Johnson.  In it, she said that her agent recieves about 3,500 query letters a year, and in that year, she only accepted 2 clients.  That means the chances of being accepted are about 1,750:1.  The fact that an agent took the time to look at it and form a reply (even if it was copy and paste), means that it was valuable enough to warrant 1) a look 2) consideration 3) a response.  That's amazing.

Aside from all of that, 1,750:1 is actually a manageable odd, considering the time I've given myself to get my book published here in America.  The problem is that I'm just so busy doing other things that I hardly have the time to send those letters out.

The good news is that I'm looking at working about 20+ hours a week tutoring, and about 10+ hours a week working at the restaurant.  I *could* give up my restaurant job, but I kinda need the money to help pay my bills off more quickly (I'm several thousand dollars in debt), but I think the main reason why I'm avoiding quitting my job is because I'm getting burned out from writing.

It's pretty much all I do.  That and tutor and play with kids, and I'm starting to wonder what the point in all of this is?

Yeah, yeah I'm paying my bills.

Yeah, yeah, I pretty much have and run my own business

Yeah, yeah, I know that I'll most likely keep working even if I make it "big".

I just... don't see the point in any of this.  Making a lasting effect on humanity doesn't really matter; it's been running perfectly fine without my input for thousands of years, why would it need mine?

Having personal relationships don't matter, because my feelings, wants, and desires are insignificant to the vast and immsearuably expansive universe we live in. 

So, what am I stuck with?  Just working until I die?  Even death is meaningless because *gasp* guess what? Things have been dying for MILLIONS of years.  What would my death matter?

No, I'm not contemplating suicide.  If even my death won't matter, then expediting the process is just as pointless.

Don't know if I'm going into another depressive cycle.  I am feeling more despondent lately.  Maybe I just feel like I'm trapped by logical necessity.  Nothing I feel matters.  Nothing I want matters.  Why care about anything?  Everything goes away.

Wow.  This was a bit of depressing blog post.  Hopefully I can pick it up next week?

See you then,