It felt weird going back there, a heavy veil of dread loomed over me. I clawed the palm of my hand at the sight of her. I teetered on the heels of my shoes as I reached up and hugged her. She smelled the same; of nothing but cigarettes and cooked food. She was wearing her red coat. The one I remembered. My eyes stung as I tried not to cry. Her face looked familiar and foreign at the same time. As the elevator crept up to the second floor, I remembered. I remembered the summers, the candies, I remembered Bill the cigarette man and Sarah’s grand kids and their decrepit apartment. I remembered she lived alone, miles away from any other human being, she lived in her own head. She lived in a mess of memories, that had moshed together with the years. She lived in a fog of denial, oblivious. She was not normal. She was definitely not normal, I thought. But later I would come to realize; I was not normal. We were not normal. This was not normal. This would never be normal. I was starting to forget the meaning of that word altogether.
No one could place where she belonged. She didn’t really fit anywhere except with her friends who, just like her, lived in varying degrees of oblivion and isolation. Take Peaches, for example. Peaches lived in the building across the way, and my only memories of her were of a middle-aged woman with a long face and a dirty head scarf on her head. When she died there was barely enough money for a service, and what little was there was paid by her friends. That made me wonder, when she died who would bury her? Who would find her? At the time I was sad to think of losing her, but as I got older the thought stopped scaring me as much, and soon I stopped thinking about it at all. I didn’t know what I would feel if she died, but I certainly knew how I felt while she was alive. I didn’t know whether I would cry or be completely numb. She hadn’t been in my life for so long and I no longer knew how I felt about her. When you lose something for a long time you learn to get along without it, then when you find it again it’s hard for you to remember how you once got along with it, rather than without it. It wasn’t like she had ever been a fixture, something that I had cherished since birth. It was a rather dark day when I was reintroduced to her. I remember standing by the dining table watching her in the living room. She was a replacement, a substitution that I did not want, however I quickly warmed up to her and she soon became like my best friend. She never judged me and told be things about our family that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. In the summer we used to go out to the boardwalk and sit down to watch the waves. In a way she was a wave rising and crashing, in and out of her own little world.
This is the base of something that will be extremely, ecstatically lovely, my friend, but it needs some work. Before I get into solid critiquing, I just want to say that even though you're missing it a little, you manage to get in so much of this rather specific feeling that it's impressive. You'll just need to cut what's ineffective, and highlight/use more of what is effective to get this where it needs to be.
Also, I'm not going to go through and nitpick because it wouldn't be worth it at this point. I'm hoping you'll change a lot of this, so I might nitpick on something you're not even keeping and that would be silly.
Now, let's start.
1. Get rid of the bad-vague sentences.
These:
Are all bad-vague sentences. You never reveal to us what the specific "this" is, so these sentences have absolutely NO meaning to the reader. They may have implicit meaning for the speaker, and you might know what that is, but if we never know, we never care about these sentences and they need to be cute.
Compare that to a good-vague sentence:
Now, you're going to be all, "But, Hannah, I didn't tell you anything about THESE sentences, either, so should I cut them, too?" Well, these are vague in that sense, I give you that. But how they differ from the sentences above is that they have intrinsic specificity that gives us a glimpse into what the stories might be. They give us just enough details to make us feel like you explained them to us even though we haven't.
Cut the bad-vague, keep the good-vague, and make EVERYTHING more specific. This is ONE person. Do not open this piece to let it possibly be "all weird people you know". Do not!! haha. That means, WHAT cooked food? What is the specific cooked food that this speaker knows so well about the topic-person?
Avoid so much of the speaker's random questionings of herself, and instead SHOW them through trains of thoughts. Instead of saying, "I didn't know what I would feel if she died", try something like, "I tried to picture her in her coffin, grasping a spray of -insert favorite flower name here-, but it didn't move me." This shares an image, but still communicates confusion.
more and more and more specificity!!
Also, about Peaches. It's odd because in this piece you don't give the main character a name, but you give this grandma a name. Names make people a little more real, and it makes it feel like you're giving Peaches more importance. Try a name on the topic-person. What does the speaker call her? Condense the peaches section to get to the point.
Condense and specify: that's my advice.
Do you have questions? Leave me a PM or wall post if you do! Let me know when you put up an edited version, because I'd like to see how this evolves.
Good luck.
Hi there, sonnetsandvignettes, and a warm welcome to YWS!
Please fasten your seat belt, sit back and relax, as your review is about to begin!
I enjoyed this read
Right, so let's start with the title. Very good and quite inviting, but it does seem to be lacking a "d" to finish off that "lived". Unless, of course, you want it to be like that, since this is poetry!
Spelling and grammar:
You seem to have replaced a "me" with a "be" in this sentence.
I would tweak the tenses a little: "When she had died, there had barely been enough money for a service, and what little there had been, had been paid by her friends."
This is why: the entire story has been written in plain past tense, so something happening before the story happened, should be one tense back, so past perfect tense. Following? Here's an example:
She /walked/ to the store that day, because the day before she /had forgotten/ to buy milk.
So use this tense rule on the rest of the story. Stuff that happened before the written moment "had happened". "I had quickly warmed up to her" and "She had never judged me".
Also see the first sentence. The comma has been used incorrectly. Just replace it with a full stop.
Typography:
So you have something to tell us. You write it down. Now people look at it and go, "It's too long!" or "I can't read that big block of stuff!" or "My eyes are crossing just looking at it!"
Check out what you have written. It is small, in a bold text format and there are no paragraph spaces, no openings, nothing. Just a big, daunting block of text. Make it easy for the readers, because they seem to be looking for excuses not to read anything. Break it up a little, make the typeface easy to read.
Poeticism:
You listed this as poetry. Now, here I would beg to differ. It looks like a prosaic sketch to me. There is nothing to indicate that this is poetry -- no rhyme scheme, no meter, no lineation.
Overall:
A very dreamy, vague style, this is not your average read, but it does offer an interesting insight into the world and people. Very good tone and atmosphere!
Keep the ink flowing
barefootrunner