Melting.

In the last few years, I've started to think of my writing process as "tempering the weirdness," which is all well and good by itself. My work does tend to start out very strange and boil down to much more straightforward stories by the end and it's stronger for that. But as of late I think I've been clamping down too much, not embracing the stage for what it is - a stage. Setting scenes in concrete places, in living rooms and lobbies - making it feel solid.

Solid.

Too solid.

No. No.

My theater is liquid.

I was happy with where my writing was two years ago, when I told a story on a bare stare with lights and sound and dialogue - poetry, if that's not too pretentious of me. Two and three years ago, when my protagonist told the world she didn't call the shots and yet exhibited masterful control over lighting cues. Self-aware. Theater as theater.

There is a time and place for realism, but I miss creating magic.

Time to peel back the restraints. Time to let the weirdness back in. Time to dig down and find the poetry again.

Okay.

Here goes.

If I ever write a Hipster Rom-Com

I will string together all of the false starts from my life into something that panders to a very specific demographic that can't be bothered to give a damn. (These all happened but they were not all with the same person and they are certainly not in order)

Boy and girl will meet at the zoo. It will be winter, and freezing, and you'd have to be stupid to actually be at the zoo that day. They will walk around all day without encountering a single other living person and lament that the geladas are indoors for winter and watch seals swim around in the courtyard. They'll buy bagels at a sketchy grocery store in the Bronx and take the train all the way back into the city together, talking the whole way about what kinds of quirky hipster literature they like and then something will happen. (Unlike real life, where nothing happened.)

She'll post ambiguous song lyric Facebook statuses that he'll respond with coded confessions of love and she'll have something witty to say back, and not something asinine, and they'll realize that the feeling's mutual instead of just one person lying awake all night wondering if they really deserve to have good things happen to them.

They'll watch a terrible movie together. Maybe it's The Room. It's not even worth paying attention. He feels her up, and she lets him, instead of repeatedly moving his hands to some part of her body she's more comfortable with him touching, because that sends all the wrong signals, and later that night he'll kiss her instead of muttering, "Sorry, I made that awkward."

In this stupid Hipster Rom-Com, I'm actually played by Zooey Deschanel, or someone who looks like her, instead of just hopelessly copying her hairstyle, even though I'm too tall and too curvy and my eyes are too dark. And the critics will call it contrived and stupid and I will say, "No, no, this is my life, you don't understand, this is my life, only edited. All I did was make it better."