Indie Ink Writing Challenge: Freedom.

This is my piece for this week's Indie Ink writing challenge. The way it works is that you sign up for the challenge weekly, and you'll be paired with another participant who will create a writing prompt for you, and you have a few days to write and submit your piece. (Click HERE if you'd like to participate next week.


This week, I challenged Bran with the prompt, "Why aren't you going back."

I was challenged by Barb She told me to write about, Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, the lyric from Bobby McGee.

(Don't get me started about the song itself. Bobby McGee and that "You can't always get what you want, but you get what you need," song by the Rolling Stones. I feel like if I hear either one of them one more time in my life, my brain will actually explode from overuse, due to a crappy song being overplayed too many times. I hate the song, but I liked the lyric as a prompt.)

Anyway, he's my piece for this week:




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I can meet men, now. I couldn't do that before. I was married and we had children. Sometimes people ask me, "Do you have any kids?" and I don't know what to tell them.

There was an accident.

There was a settlement.

I visited Greece last month. I'm thinking about going to China.

The last time we talked, we fought. "It isn't fair," I told him. "I'm stuck here all day with the boys, and I can't even buy myself a dress for my sister's wedding. When is any of this going to be worth it?"

I had trouble sleeping, before. I hated my life. I was trapped and wild, daydreaming about wide open spaces and a sky so big you could reach up and grab an armful of clouds. I sat alone in the living room at four in the morning, biting my lower lip and crying. Could I leave them? I thought that I probably could.

That's all over, now. I have pills that make me sleep at night, I have my space. I don't dream anymore.

I can go anywhere I want. I met an American at my hotel in Greece. His wife was sleeping in their room. I lifted my skirt for him on a salt-white slab of rock, overlooking blue water. I wanted to ruin his life, to murder his wife, sweetly asleep under starched white sheets smelling of bleach. The man said to me, "The women I sleep with are usually younger than you." He was drunk. His hands fumbled at me, aggressively.

"I am older than time," I wanted to tell him. "I know all about living too long. I am older than I deserve to be."

"I can see why," I said, instead. "You're a terrible lover, a real woman could see right through you."

He laughed and told me I was beautiful. "I hope I see you tomorrow. I'll be with her, but I want to look over at you and know what your body feels like under me."

This is what I wanted. I wanted everything to disappear. I wanted to travel, for my life to be full of exotic midnight meetings. I dreamed all of this. I wanted to be a devil, to be free.

He finished and wiped himself clean on a white handkerchief, delicately embellished with fine silver threads that caught the light of the moon and were so pretty they broke my heart. I didn't have anywhere to be, so I wanted to get drunk. I told him, and he smiled and his teeth were too big. This is what I wanted. Drinks, overlooking a strange sea at night.

"I'll look for you tomorrow," he said. "I hope I see you."

"I could throw myself from this balcony, and it wouldn't matter," I thought.

This isn't what I wanted.


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