Homecoming

Homecoming 

By Matthew Ciarvella 

I drive with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road, trying to navigate with the other eye on the GPS. You would think you wouldn’t forget how to find your way home, but navigating by memory only works when you get to a place that you actually remember and the world you remember as a child is so much smaller. It just stops in your mind after a certain point and even though you know logically that there is more to the world beyond that point in memory, you don’t remember what it looks like. You can’t, really. You’re asking for an adult’s responsibility of a child’s memory.

So that’s what the GPS is for. Its faux-female voice is my only companion in an otherwise silent car. “In one point two miles, turn left!” the GPS exclaims with a sort of automated enthusiasm, as if it care whether or not I ever reach my destination.

I miss the turn. It comes up on me suddenly as I’m glancing at the tiny GPS screen and it’s too late for me to get over in time.

Road Rage

It's been a while, hasn't it? I have to admit, the main reason I'm here right now is because I'm tired of banging my head against the wall that has been the process of editing the novel. Progress has been... slow on that project. The main problem is that I wrote the story for NaNoWriMo, which meant I was writing the story without really knowing yet what was going on. I figured I'd just blaze through any sticky points and fix it all on the second draft. Well, now it's the second draft and there's a lot to fix, and it's all very daunting, to say the least.

The other, lesser reason that I'm here is because I'm worried that I'm doing too much typing on my smartphone these days and I fear that I am losing the ability to type without relying on autocorrect.

I actually came here today to tell you a story about something that happened to me today. More after the page break.

In the Waning Hours of 2011

Perhaps waning hours is a little inaccurate, considering my time zone and the fact that it's just after morning here. Whatever. It's poetic and I like it; it's certainly better than "2011: a year in review." Oh, and hello! It's been roughly 1 million internet years since I wrote anything on this blog, which means if you're reading this, I appreciate your continued loyalty in the face of my continued silence.

So this post is going to be about 2011 and what the year meant to me. After 2010, which was a largely negative experience, I wanted to make a dedicated effort to living a better life. Also, it was the year of my "golden birthday" since I'd turned 24 on the 24 (and if you argue that 2010 was the year I turned 24 which makes that the Golden Year, eff off because that lasted for all of seven days.)

How do the years stack up in terms of personal achievement? Let's see:

Short Story: The World Below

Author's Note: As I blow off the dust that's gathered on my poorly neglected blog, it occurs to me that despite the fact that all I ever talk about is writing, you most likely haven't had the opportunity to see anything I've written. I feel like this is a mistake, one that I'm going to correct.

This was a short story that I wrote about a year ago for one of my final Creative Classes. It's one of the few short stories I'm particularly proud of, although I'm not a big fan of the ending these days. Perhaps I'll revisit it in the future. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

-MC

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"The World Below"
By Matthew Ciarvella

           Nobody alive today remembers the old subway tunnel under the bridge on Broad Street. It used to be part of the Erie Canal, but that was an even longer time ago, or so our father told us, back during the lazy summer days of late July when the plant would close and we'd sit out in the backyard under a shady tree with beers that we weren't old enough to drink, but did anyway. First, it was a canal, he'd said, and then later, it was a subway, and then it was nothing at all, just a tunnel that ran under the entire city like an empty vein. Parts of it had collapsed over the years, and one time, it took out an entire section of Broad Street and killed an old lady who was walking her dog. Or maybe it killed a taxi driver who stopped to have a smoke, or a bike messenger, or a hundred other different people, or nobody, depending who was telling you the story.
            We grew up hearing stories of that old tunnel, even though nobody knew how to get in, or how much of it was left. The section that collapsed was filled in after the accident, but you'd still hear stories about people finding old stairways in their basements that led down into the tunnel. But nobody really knew and so it was just this place that we all knew but never saw, had all heard about but only in stories. Kids ran away to live down there, winos carved out shitty little homes there, and some people (stupid fucking idiots, my father would say) would go down there to play at being explorers and were never seen again.

For The Sake Of August

I couldn't let an entire month slip by without writing something. Well, actually, I could and indeed almost did. Which would be bad. But even worse than not writing anything for an entire month (well, actually longer than that, if you look at the last entry, but who's counting? Not me!) would be yet another "writing a post just to have a post." I've come to realize how pointlessly self-indulgent such things are, which is not to say that the entire act of blogging itself isn't self-indulgent. It's just that I think some things are higher on that particular scale than others.