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Drabble Corner

Michelle Swisz

"Listen to the pouring rain" is the title of this month's Drabble—a romance by Tantri K. Orr.

Listen to the pouring rain

"Oh, is that it?" she asks, reaching for the envelope.

"Yes," he replies his fingers holding it down, almost touching hers.

Glancing down, she pulls her hand away.

"You don’t have to be like that, you know me better than that; I get pissed off when you say you’re here for one thing and you mean another."

"Yeah," he says, "I know."

Rain pours outside in blackness.

For a moment all he can see, hear and feel is memory, sweet, beautiful, warm, funny, like it was right now.

He closes the door softly. She picks up the envelope. Still raining.

Having an interesting (at least my hair stylist thinks so) love life, interesting as in the curse. "May you live in interesting times," may be good for my writing, I hope, even if it does drive me bananas.

One thing it's making me ask myself is, how do we go about working our hearts? I mean, is it best to simply let what happens in love happen? He wants to move in together—just do it? Or she wants to break up—don't resist? But what if we can't seem to help but want closeness that isn't happening; does that mean it's best that the closeness not happen? What if something is in the way that is best taken out of the way? Something inside yourself, that is—something that at the moment keeps you from further opening your heart.

Hearts melt. I don't want to add now to what has been written on that theme. What I am thinking of is letting your heart open up just that bit more where it is stuck without in the process letting it get so gooey and sticky that it seems you can't ever again pull your feet out of the muck that spilled out. That is, without pouring your whole life into the other person's life. No one can take in someone else's whole life. In the beginning, it's fun to like country music for the first time in your life because you've fallen in love with someone who does. But you can't expect to feel the same way about their stamp collection or expect them to be enthusiastic about or even tolerate going to action films or chick flicks. What they can't and won't absorb of endless merging just gets spilled out as muck on the floor. So one must open up without pouring endless muck all over the place.

Can we love (and live) without shutting each other out or attacking each other when we get hurt, on the one hand, or without opening so much so fast that we overstep our own boundaries and get excruciatingly stuck in the muck (and risking the relationship itself in the process of getting unstuck), on the other hand?

Here is our theme for November: loving well. Let's do this as a story, like last month's (rather than as an essay about the theme).

Here are the Guidelines again, and the address to send submissions: drabble@wvu.org. To summarize the guidelines: 100 words exactly, with title not included in the word count. The piece is due on the 10th of the month before the column with that theme comes out—so submissions for How Love Works are due by November 10.

See you next month.