Dio Writes

I… don’t really know where this came from, I just… know it came from me. As meta as it might be, as strange as it seems, this… helped. I feel less out of alignment. I feel more ‘right’ after writing this, like I’ve regained a small piece of something vital. So… yeah.

#writing #fiction #metafiction

“Ugh.” Dio curses, deleting the paragraphs of the small story she’s written. The story hadn’t been bad, no… it had been passably entertaining, possibly even good, but… “There’s something I’m fucking meant to be writing and these diversions, these distractions… they’re not right. I see the pieces, I… I don’t know, I feel that there’s something there, something building, but… fuck. Fuck. It’s not coalescing. It feels important. It feels necessary. But… I need a push, I need something, I’m not sure what. I need to connect.”

She’s been playing with formatting, revisiting old stories. She’s been playing with fonts, killing time with poetry, teasing boys, watching videos on the time sink that is YouTube. All that to ignore the fact that she’s not been writing what she’s meant to write. All that because…

“Because I’m scared to get it wrong.” She says aloud, softly. “The story has to be right.”

In her life, she finds messages. “Don’t waste your life on meaningless things.” It says. “There are depths to things you’ve not yet grasped.” It says. “Don’t forget who you are.” It says.

“I’m not sure who I am.” She sighs. “I hide behind a veneer of fiction to protect myself. I know who I want to be, but will I get there? I don’t know. I don’t even know that’s even possible. And all that is clouding things, clouding what I am meant to write, if I am even meant to write it. Am I meant to write it?

A whisper, perhaps imagined

The girl who is Dio… no, the girl whose mask is Diotima… does not hesitate. “Yeah. Yeah. I think I am. Whatever it is, I think more than that, I need to write it. But it isn’t about focus, or driving myself, it’s about… letting go.” Not an epiphany, no… but a realization.

“I need to let go.” She pauses. “I… that’s hard for me. I have always been in control. I need to… no. That’s not right. I have never learned to let go.” A small smile. “Explains why I’m so difficult in bed.” A sigh. “I know. Jokes. I joke when I’m nervous. But yeah. Maybe I’m Diotima because I needed to be able to not be the one everyone relies on, at least sometimes. I like being… I don’t know, it sounds terrible but I like being… less than I am. Letting people think I’m less intelligent than I am, less serious, more fun. It’s… yeah. I guess I needed to feel what that was like.”

A sense of something waiting

The girl who is / is not Diotima continues. “I know. I know. This can’t last. It’s… there’s so much of me in her, but there’s so much missing, too. And if I am to…” She pauses. “This isn’t just about writing any more, I know.” A fleeting urge to cry, quickly suppressed.

“What do I fear? That nothing changes. That I’m stuck, we’re stuck and this is all meaningless. That I’m, I don’t know, writing a strange meta stream of consciousness thought experiment that amounts to nothing. That I’m stuck being less than I want to be. That I don’t have the ...whatever… to push myself into doing what needs to be done.”

“But this exercise. I think I needed this.”