[October, 1994] Raphaela Smashes

Nastassja Kinsi in Faraway, So Close!

[“Raphaela Smashes” was the first short story I wrote for my creative writing class. It was about a teenage girl who hates high school except for an art class where all she does is sculpt clay angels. A few angsty excerpts:

I used to be so much more tolerant of this place—no, that’s wrong.  It was never the place, always the people.  I can’t see how I’ll be able to conform to their blueprint of an average, non-interfering girl anymore.  Molding myself into their empty smiles has taken its toll and my tolerance of them has gone dry, leaving me raw and bracing myself for their sharp neglect.  I wonder if maybe I was better off sugar-coated.

* * * * *

I haven’t decided which version of me to be this year.  I think I have outgrown all of my old masks, the nice, pretty ones.  The silent, claustrophobic ones.  Maybe I can dig a new one out of the gutter.

* * * * *

I’m alone up here.  I don’t cry, it just makes the hole deeper (and it’s already becoming hard to crawl out of).  I practice breathing, doing it normally has been giving me trouble lately.  I’ve been feeling like something invisible is trying to strangle me, some thought or emotion lodged in my trachea.]

10/4/94

“You didn’t hurt me

Nothing can hurt me

You didn’t hurt me

Nothing can stop me now” – nine inch nails

We discussed Raphaela Smashes in class today and I was incredibly happy with how much people liked it.  I don’t think cut adrift… is going to be as well received.  I haven’t decided how I feel about it yet.  I’ve read it over a lot, but I don’t know what I’d change about it.

Oh well, I should focus more on my next story.  I really want to call it My Empire of Dirt and am almost ready to construct an entire story on that title.  I want it to be about little girls.  Around 9 years old.

I was really touched (and a little surprised) with how many people identified with my first story.  It was really nice, felt good.

“And in our world a heart of darkness

A firezone

Where poets speak their hearts then bleed for it.” – U2

 

So much for holding back my feelings.  My fiction was rife with them, brimming with enough teen anguish for a dozen Angela Chases and Brian Krakows.

This short story was published in a literary journal at the end of the year, which was a point of pride for me, because I was approached to submit a piece by someone who had shared the writing class with me.

Funny that I couldn’t believe that my classmates were able to identify with the alienation I portrayed in this story (a theme that would appear over and over and over in my writing).  It’s hard to imagine others feeling that sort of isolation, especially in a school full of bright, accomplished kids.  And yet so many of had our own personal cocktails of misery brewing within us, blind to the fact that we were all going through variations of the same thing.

It terms of inspiration, I wore my influences on my sleeve. Raphaela was the main character in Faraway, So Close! the sequel to Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. I suppose I was going through a bit of of an obsession with arty movies about angels (who hasn’t, right?… right?…). I knew I’d never top Wenders’ interpretation of celestial beings, but I tried to work in some kind of homage anyway.

Music continued to be the biggest inspiration, though. “Cut adrift” was short for “cut adrift but still floating” (a U2 lyric) but I decided to change “my empire of dirt” (a nine inch nails lyric) to  “Happiness in Slavery” (a nine inch nails song title). Nowadays, whenever I see a book or movie title based on a song, my first temptation is to get irked at the lack of originality, but then I have to remind myself I used to do the same thing, and it was more about paying tribute than anything else.

One upside to having a journal where I didn’t gush about my feelings as much was having fewer entries devoted to boys.  Mind you, the crushes were undoubtedly still there, but putting my passion into music and writing seemed like a better outlet than unrequited love, and more fun to reminisce about years later.