Defying death with no nets...

Already a nervous person, she decided that watching the acrobats at the State Fair may not have been the best idea. 

Selective hearing...

Self-taught selective hearing—so he hears everything he wants to and none of what he doesn't.

Hold on and brave the storm...

The storm keeps her up—"Hold me close." With every gust of wind against the shutters outside their window, she holds him tighter. His arms, heavy with sleep, pull her into him. As the rain grows louder, and the lightning crackles in the night sky, her hand grips the collar of his white t-shirt. Half-asleep, she invisions the storm touching down, destroying houses, churches, and roads along its charted path. All they had built together, suddenly scattered debris. She shudders, fully awake now—"Hold me so we are not torn apart. Hold me until the storm passes. Hold me."

On my table at a Greek restaurant...

was this coaster. And I just had to share it.






I want to work for Canadian Club's marketing department. "Damn right your dad drank it." And yes, they went to the effort of trademarking that phrase. Genius.

Explanation...

I have had several people ask me about the title of the below blog, as there are several theories on the paradox of the unstoppable force and the immovable object. I understand that one theory states that it is impossible for those two forces to exist in the same universe because they, for lack of a more scientific description, cancel each other out—you cannot have a force that cannot be resisted and an object that cannot be moved by any force. For those of you that think this way (and if this were my thought process), I agree that the title would not make much sense, as the purpose of the story was to discuss the couple finding one another each night in a beautiful collision of sorts.

I chose to look at the concept of unstoppable force vs. immovable object in the following way: in taking an unstoppable force and pairing it with an immovable object, the result would be ultimate power. You have two forces that are the best in their divisions, if you will. They would be the extreme tag team. And, in researching this hypothetical phenomenon, I found the phrase “infinite potential” and fell in love with it. If these two forces existed and were to collide, the product of that collision would be called “infinite potential”. Isn’t that an exciting idea? By these two forces coming together, anything would be possible because they both hold ultimate strength and would be, in fact, omnipotent.

With that being said, the man (the immovable object) and the woman (the unstoppable force) in the short short story differ vastly in their daily patterns, etc. Some may even deem this couple incompatible or mismatched, but when they find each other in the night and they are once again together, their potential is infinite.

I do not want readers to overthink short shorts, as they are meant to be taken at face value. That’s the beauty of writing—it may mean one thing to you and something entirely different to someone else. You may hate it. Someone else may love it. Therein lies the gray area that I appreciate so much in literature. And to over-explicate writing robs it of its certain je ne sais quoi—and that’s just a crime (albeit one I am now guilty of).

She was the unstoppable force to his immovable object...

It was all about compromise—as are most things in life. She liked attending parties on New Year's Eve. He liked staying in—watching the ball drop. She was constantly going, going. And he would rather sink into his spot on the couch with a good book. She always had a plan, places to be. But as long as he could reach out in the night and find her body warm with sleep, leaning over to kiss the corner where her lips meet, none of these differences mattered.

In her brain it is chaos and sparks...

Sparks that ignite a fire, sweeping the mindscape, an unstoppable force. No one can pin the source, so there is no one to blame, catch red-handed. Her thoughts commit arson, triggered by a switch she has never seen. A spiral-down blur to desolate ground. Everything gone, buried underneath soot and rubble. But she will rebuild what is lost. A phoenix rising from the ashes once again, triumphant.

For B.