The Shapes We See In Stars

2

I was trying to write a book. Trying... But not really. Most days I would sit and stare at a blank piece of paper, wondering why I was so good at coming up with ideas but so bad at writing them down. I don't want to be a writer when I get older, and it's not just because my parents say that most writers are starving artists with no lives. It's because of the blank paper and the way that I've learned to hate the color white because it means that there's no ink on the page.

I wish you could get a job coming up with ideas. I'd be good at that. If only I could just put the stories in my head into someone else's head and then that person could turn them into ink. That's not really how the world works though.

But I'm getting distracted. I do that a lot. I'm sorry.

Anyways, I was trying to write a book, and, one night, I walked to the Denny's nestled in the shopping center nearby my house. My mom doesn't like it when I walk to the shopping center because it's right next to a highway, and I might get run over or mugged or kidnapped. I go anyways. I tell her that I'm meeting friends there even when I'm not. This makes her feel better for some reason. So far I haven't gotten run over, mugged, or kidnapped, so I think it's probably fine, even if I don't have friends to meet or anything like that.

It was about midnight, and I sat in the booth furthest from the door, waiting for words like a late businessman waiting for the bus. I didn't order anything. I was hungry, but the waitstaff never asked me for an order. We had come to an unspoken understanding. I wouldn't bother them if they didn't bother me. They knew I came here because I liked the quiet. 

Sometimes if you spend too much time in the quiet, you start to go crazy. One time, one of my teachers at school asked me if all the time I spent in the quiet made me go crazy. I told her that I was already crazy, so it didn't really matter either way. I was joking, but I don't think she knew that. She didn't call on me again for the rest of the year. 

It was one of those nights when the bus was so late that the businessman had fallen asleep. The paper was blank, and it had been that way for an entire month. The thoughts in my head were too big, and squeezing them out through the pen was impossible. They simply didn't fit.

I clicked my pen a few times to keep the quiet from making me go crazy. 

You're probably wondering what kind of story I was trying to write. I can't really tell you because there wasn't a story. There was a plot, but there wasn't a story. I couldn't put the weight of my ideas into words, so all of the events were empty, and, because they had nothing weighing them down, they had an unfortunate tendency to flit around, changing order and shape and crashing into one another to form more empty and flittery events.

The general plot was about a boy who was scared of a monster hiding in his closet. Every night he could hear the monster moving around, but when he told his parents, they would open the closet and turn on the lights and say, "Look, no monster. Nothing to be worried about," and then they would tuck him in and tell him that story about the boy who cried wolf. But, the boy wasn't crying wolf. The monster was just turned invisible when the lights came on. It sounds good when you condense it like that. It checked all the 'literature' boxes: young protagonist, danger, darkness, belief, family, something that could be interpreted by some zealous English teacher as a metaphor. But it added up to nothing. 

My void of a notebook sat in front of me as I stared out of the window, watching the bright beams of headlights approach, glare blindingly, and fade into the night. I should have been doing homework instead of sitting in a plush, yet sticky booth, smelling coffee and pancakes, and thinking about the way that headlights enter and leave a moment like strangers at a Denny's. But I wasn't. I couldn't focus on homework on a night like that one. My thoughts were too loud to do anything but think.

It was about 11:00 when it started raining. It started with the soft rapping of a couple of raindrops on the windowpane-- a visitor asking if it had permission to enter humanity's realm of observation. The hard glow of the fluorescents softened. "Yes," they said to the rain, "You are welcome." As the rain started to come down harder, the tension in my muscles that I didn't know existed seeped out onto the floor, washed away by the water. My thoughts flew out of my head and danced in the dark clouds, playing an elaborate game of hide-and-go-seek amongst the streetlights. Pen to paper. A spark of an idea. My fingers itched to give physical manifestation to the abstract infinity that is humanity. 

At that moment, I remembered that I didn't really like the quiet. I just said I did because it felt right for some reason and if I kept saying the same thing maybe it would be true and I would finally be able to stop listening to that little voice in my head that gets louder when there's no noise to drown it out. The rain was so beautiful and loud that I almost didn't notice when the door to the Denny's opened.

It was a flock of soggy teenagers whose shoes squeaked on the wet tile floor as they stepped inside. I looked at them out of the corner of my eyes. Lightning flashed. The picture of them at that moment is still here with me, even now. They looked different then because I thought that they were different people. I thought that they were headlights. I thought that I would look away and they would be replaced with another flock of soggy teenagers with squeaky shoes. Maybe that would have been better.

But it turned out that they were more like the smell of coffee,  their spirits forever lingering in my memories, just like the way that the bitter aroma of coffee never quite leaves your nose. Did you know that, out of all of the senses, smell is the one most closely linked to memory? Charlie told me that once. Maybe that's why I think of coffee whenever I think of them. 

The rumble of thunder pulled me back into my writing. I picked up my pen and started a new story: one not about a boy and a monster, but one about the way that coffee smells next to a highway during a warm summer rainstorm.