Yeah… I missed a day and almost missed again. No reason, just be fucking up. ya know? I don’t feel like writing again, so I’m going to post a little excerpt from the vault. Here’s the first couple paragraphs of yet another high school novel, In God’s Country. A story about a closeted gay teen who falls in love with a boy in a small, southern, conservative town.
There’s a creek by my grandma and grandpa’s house that I would go to when I spent summers at their house. It was a small creek, with a thin stream flowing through it. I remember how I would hear the buzzing of the mosquitoes, the chirping of the birds, and the running of the random critters. The stream itself was fairly quiet. So when I was there, I would sit and just think. I sat on this log about a yard from the stream. There was this sweet release from the outside world whenever I got there. It was like I was transported to another world. This place that was free from the trappings of reality. They called it God’s Country, and the name fit. God’s Country is the collective name for the state of North Carolina, according to some people. I have to admit that this whole state is a testament to the beauty God has made, but also a testament to the absolute ugliness God has made as well. You see back when I would visit my grandparent’s house, I became aware of the juxtaposition that God has plagued upon the Earth. Earth and its inhabitants are opposed, standing on two separate sides of a divide since the dawn of time. In the time since, the divide has not dissipated.
God’s Country to me was a place for me to relax, to get away from the existence of a world where life had become complicated. The time in which this story takes place, I was only twelve years old. Not quite a teenager, yet not quite a child. I was teetering on the edge of a well-known phenomenon known as puberty. The thing which would have rendered me a man according to my dad. But that time as a man still hasn’t come. I’m still coming to terms with that experience I had with my grandparents that summer. It wasn’t their fault, quite the contrary actually. But the area in which they lived filled me with this feeling I still feel to this day. What will be written here will be a bit blasphemous, a bit crazy, and perhaps a bit disturbing. But I lived through it, and I wanted to speak on it.
Pretense & Circumstance 