Workshop #7

Prompt: Write down 5 nouns and 5 verbs and make them into a sentence. The idea is to practice specificity.

Nouns: glasses, carpet, skin, branches, baubles

Verbs: drinking, wondering, wandering, dancing, breathing

As I wander a forbidden wood, I stop and wonder at low-hanging branches from which exotically colored baubles hang, sunlight glinting on their form and the lenses of my glasses that drink in the heat; I breathe deep, my skin prickly, a carpet of bleeding hearts and sticky grass bending under my feet as I approach.

Next, begin a sentence with “I cannot stop thinking about…” and fill it in.

I cannot stop thinking about what romance means. How I’ve seen all the same movies and shows, read all the same books, as everyone else, and yet, I don’t think I know what romance is at all. How everyone else seems to know, and I’m the only one wondering, wandering, seeking answers as to why the road to happiness is in partnership with the opposite sex. How happiness is supposed to be sex itself. How the future is a bed I’m supposed to share, which seems more difficult even than sharing my life or the space on my fourth finger. How it’s all red roses and being asked to prom and expensive dinners in uncomfortable clothes and tonsil tennis, and I don’t know what romance is.

I cannot stop thinking about how much I love romance. I love the sweeping wind in the trees disrupting my curls and sending them astray. I love a cool creek between my toes. I love my best friend’s voice in my ear late at night, and the way we linger long past an appropriate hour, not quite saying, “No, you hang up,” like infuriating high schoolers in a 90s romance, but something close. I love “this made me think of you.” I love rainfall ruining my plans, leaving me to linger by windows gazing at the sky, constructing a fantasy of forever. I love poetry, and outdated words like “grimalkin,” and tangerine tea that’s just a little too hot and a little too sweet. I love making someone laugh until they can’t breathe at all.

When I am filled up with this love, for my world, for my people, I think I know what romance means. And maybe it’s okay if no one else knows it the way that I do.