We take an unknown leap when we fall in love; trusting the care of our heart to another person.
This month I had the prompt to write a love story from my online writing group. The assignment was to choose one of the 6 senses: touch, sight, smell, sound, taste, or magic. We had to write about a character whose sense we chose is heightened or diminished. We needed to explore how their distorted sense affects them or those around them? And we could make it a love story... This was well within my wheelhouse since love and relationship stories are my passion. I also decided that I wanted to play on the current themes of how people meet that differs from when I was growing up.
I concentrated on sound since it is a sense that I don’t appreciate in the context of love or give a tremendous amount of thought to, but it is something that I imagine could confuse someone's feelings. I remember as a child I went to camp and had a tremendous crush on a counsellor whose speech was dysarthric or apraxic. It made me wonder how a love story incorporating that auditory dissonance in contemporary times might play out. “His voice was distinctively him, my Zebrafish. The absence of the alveolar trill of the dropped Rs in my name, and his soft sweet drawl pulled the corners of my mouth into a smile.”
There were so many threads that came together to weave this story of mine, and it took a lot to imagine the reality of my character. Not to mention, speech can be difficult to describe. But, I wanted to give myself a challenge. So I donned my academic hat and dove deep into the research of learning a new glossary of terms. In our day and age of texting and digital culture, I thought to explore the auditory experience of a relationship in the context of our current modalities of communication would make for an interesting love story.
I'd been doing some edits on my novel and took a break to work on my monthly writing group assignment. I was feeling like I wanted to give my novel’s protagonist some sort of hope. My novel ends dismally and so this little piece also felt like it could be an epilogue of sorts for my own peace of mind... I doubt I have more to say about the short story to actually make it a sequel to my novel.
“… delighting my tympanic membrane like a gentle caress that would linger along its journey deep within me… his words would bounce around inside me until they’d find their final resting place in the warming of my heart.”
One of my writing group members mentioned the dissociation we sometimes have when meeting a radio personality in person. All these little threads came together to craft Zebrafish; a story about a broken-hearted girl who finds love and learns to trust again despite all these auditory obstacles.
My short was very well-received and I am always humbled by the compliments on my prose. However, so far the male love interest in my novel, let's call him Joe, is not well-liked. I have woven my female protagonist into a few stories outside the novel and her other male counterparts are always better received than Joe. I am going to have to start sharing some of the wooing passages to get my readers to fall in love with Joe just as they have fallen in love with my Zebrafish.
Perhaps, I took a leap with Joe and was blinded by love myself...
