I wrote a short story called "A Vignette from Muncie, IN" and I'm really depressed. Peter Sourian really wanted me to write about Indiana and so I did and I didn't realize that it was so depressing and i didn't know how much I have blocked from my mind. I'll let you read what really happened that night
A Vignette from Muncie, IN
We drove in the darkness of the Indiana night. I was sitting in the passenger seat of the family car. I don’t remember the time but the sky was black, purple, and unpleasant. It might have been raining. I didn’t remember these things because I didn’t want to remember them.
I remember we didn’t talk. He just grasped the steering wheel, looking forward and drove fast down the very straight and very flat roads of the farmland. I had never seen such straight roads in my life.
I was looking out the window and all I could see was dark. I saw the traffic lights change colors in front of us. We seemed so close to it but it was fifteen more minutes of quiet until we actually reached the blinking red light.
We stopped outside a convenient store. He didn’t ask me if I wanted anything and walked inside, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I wanted to escape but where? I didn’t know where I was and it was too dark. I was trapped to face whatever what was going to happen to me. And it was very uncertain what was going to happen to me.
Just by the way Alex walked, I knew he was in pain. I didn’t like seeing him like this, but I didn’t care. It was sad that I didn’t care that my boyfriend, who they say was obviously in love with me, was in extreme amounts of pain. I shouldn’t have told him. I shouldn’t have told him at all. Johnny told me not to tell but goddammit, why did I have to listen to Alex’s stupid ex girlfriend in that horrible Chinese restaurant and tell him! I had to tell someone. When something happens to you that you think was amazing, you have to tell someone and I happened to tell the wrong person.
Alex walked out of the convenient store holding a bottle of water. He looked like he had been crying. It was kind of weird to see a 235 lbs, 6’4” soldier of America’s elite Armed Forces cry when I wasn’t even shedding a tear. I wasn’t crying because I was too frightened.
He got back in the car and started to drive again. I still didn’t know where we were going. He had just put me in the car because we needed to talk about what transpired on New Year’s Eve. I told my therapist that when I got back to Connecticut and she shook her head.
“Emily, never get in the car with them! You have common sense to know that!”
Alex looked over at me but I didn’t look back at him. I just stared out at the black Midwestern space I was occupying.
“How could you?” It was first thing he had said to me since I had told him. “My best friend…I swear Johnny’s going to get the shit kicked out of him…”
“No…” I interrupted him and looked into his eyes. “It was my fault and my doing. Don’t blame him.”
In all honesty, it was Johnny Allen Garrison’s fault and not mine. I just didn’t want Johnny to be hated by his best friend for something like this. I would never see either of them again and they…they were on the swim team together! They sat next to each other in second grade! I didn’t want to be the cause of a falling out.
It was Johnny Garrison’s fault. It always has been and it always will. I try to tell myself that everyday that he’s not worth my time. Johnny Garrison was never worth waiting for, day after day at my mailbox, hoping for a letter from Sheppard Air Force base with no results. He wasn’t worth writing; he wasn’t worth throwing away a relationship for. To think I believed him when he told me that we’d see each other again; “undoubtedly” was the word he used.
“So what happened?” I hadn’t noticed he had stopped the car in his old high school parking lot. So this was where he’d played football and been the Midwestern dream.
“Oh Alex…” I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to tell him that his best friend and his girlfriend had secretly had sex on the bathroom floor while he was asleep, thinking that his girlfriend, the girl he loves, was sleeping in the bed next to him in the Radisson hotel in Muncie, Indiana.
His voice grew stronger. He lifted his hand and I flinched. “Tell me what happened.”
I had stopped looking at him and looked out the car window to the cold Indiana parking lot. “Well…I had sex with him.” I said it. It hurt to say it but I did. But when the words came out, it sounded like I was proud of what I did.
Alex’s eyes filled up with tears. “What? You did what?” He opened the car door and slammed it, leaving me alone again in the car. I know it was because he didn’t want me to see him cry.
I thought I was dead. I knew in the glove compartment or in this car somewhere, there’s a gun and he’s going to shoot me. I’m not going to be alive anymore. I had never feared for my life in such a way that I did in the car in the Delta High school parking lot. But I had brought this on myself. I was the one that got drunk. I was the one that should have gone to the hospital with the alcohol poisoning. But Alex was the one that put me in the hands of his best friend Johnny A. Garrison.
“Wait, Johnny…you’re a medic in the Air Force, you take care of her.” And for three hours, there I was, in the lap of a stranger, who was holding my hair back, whispering in my ear with his soothing and beautiful voice about how I needed to drink water from this black coffee mug. I had come to my senses wrapped in a blanket in the arms of the most beautiful man I had ever seen. And where was my boyfriend? I had asked Johnny Garrison in an incoherent stupor and he told me Alex was smoking a cigar in the lobby. His girlfriend was dying, her pupils rolled in the back of her head, her body slipping in and out of consciousness and where was he? Smoking a fucking cigar in the fucking hotel lobby!
In the car, I went through the entire night in my head. I had no sense of time and Alex was nowhere to be seen. I closed my eyes and thought of Johnny.
“I know I shouldn’t be saying this,” Johnny Garrison whispered in my ear. “But you’re very beautiful.”
Johnny told me I was beautiful when my hair was a mess, I wasn’t wearing a shirt, only Johnny’s black zip up sweat shirt and my mouth encrusted with vomit. He pushed away the hair from my face.
When I was throwing up and unknown of what was going on, Johnny made me feel safe. No one had ever been this nice to me, not even Alex…no one had taken such good care of me. I looked into his electric blue eyes, looked at his short blonde hair, his pale skin with a smile draped across it, and I fell in love.
It was I that kissed him so maybe it was my fault. I had just thrown up for the eighth time (so they say it was the eighth time, I don’t remember) that night but he didn’t seem to mind reminisces of vomit that floated into his mouth. Let this be known: Johnny Allen Garrison was completely sober.
We lay on the floor of the bathroom for a while with the light turned on. We talked about relationships.
“I’ve only been in love once.” He kissed me on the cheek. “You remind me a lot of her.”
He asked me if I had been with another John before. I told him of my best friend John from home and how he’s amazing.
“He sounds like an incredible guy.” Johnny smiled. “I hope I can only be as amazing as your best friend.”
I nodded. “You’ve already done so much for me. You’re more amazing than anyone I have ever met in my whole life.”
I opened my eyes when Alex got back in the car. The light from the high school showed he had been crying. The bottle of water sat unopened in the cup holder. He opened it and drank.
“You’re very lucky I’m not a violent man.” He started to car and then stopped it.
“So what was this relationship about Emily? What was I to you?” He voice started to rise until he was shouting. The windows of the car vibrated with the sound of his voice. I started to tremble but I wouldn’t look or say anything. “Was I just your fucking soldier boy? Answer me!”
“I don’t know…” It was the only thing I could say. It took all the courage to even say that.
“You don’t know?” He was still yelling. “You don’t fucking know?”
“I don’t know.” I just said it again. Why had I gone out with Alex? I don’t know why I did. He was just there at West Point; he was outgoing, intelligent, and a grasp of some sort of goals. But I couldn’t tell him that in the car. So I just kept saying, “I don’t know.”
“Well I’ll tell you why I loved you.” The car had started to move, faster than before, and was charging down the Indiana roads with great force. “I went out with you because it looked like you had potential. That you were going to change and be something great.”
Change. Alex had spoke repeatedly about change. Of course, I didn’t know how to change and what was I supposed to change into, maybe his spineless senator’s wife who wore pillbox hats and baked fruitcake?
“I don’t know how to change Alex.” I just told him simply. I didn’t want to be here in Indiana anymore. I was starting not to care about him and I felt less sorry for him. “I am who I am.”
“Yeah, and it sickens me. You have so much potential…”
I didn’t ask about change and what it meant ever again. All I said was, “Okay I’ll change.” I just wanted him to be quiet.
He started to talk about New Years Eve but I had tuned him out. I remember him talking about “mocking his love” but I wasn’t sure what it was a reference to. Probably something I said while I lay on the hotel floor with strangers staring at me. The reference had come back to me but not till I was safely on the airplane in mid air.
I had asked Alex if he loved me, and he told me yes. He asked if I loved him and I said yes. He asked me if I was serious, I laughed and said no. In a way, I had, “mocked his love,” and only months after I left do I feel actually bad for what I did to him. But when I was in that car, I didn’t want to listen and didn’t want to even care about what Alex was actually saying to me.
We drove for a long time in silence again. It was well needed and I just wanted to think about the night before.
“I’ll give you two choices,” Johnny whispered in my ear, “one is I can pick you up and put you to bed because you need it after the night you’ve been through or we close this door, never tell Alex any of this that happened, and I’ll slowly and humanely make love to you.”
Alex had pulled the car into the garage and got out. He looked awful. His eyes were bloodshot and red as fire.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.” He opened the door to the garage and walked into the house. I followed him but turned into the guest bedroom and shut the door. I flopped down on the fold out bed and finally had to cry.

Todd had sex three times this morning...
And I...well I woke up alone and listened to the rain fall, let me repeat that...by myself.
It's not that I don't mind being alone, I'm used to it. The point is that I deserve great things...I deserve what people who don't deserve it have...not that Todd and Monica don't deserve sex..well Monica deserves it, she's cool...but that's not the point...the point is, that my luck with men has sucked me dry. The men this year have been nothing but confusing: Johnny Garrison, Blake, Isaac Erbele (well he wasn't confusing...he just had to be in the military...) anyway, this three guys have great personalities...are very nice people but what ever happened to them? Johnny Garrison slips off to the great state of Texas and leaves me feeling like i should call the cops on him, Isaac Erbele comes to visit but has been living in this bubble so he doesn't know what to do with himself (but he did turn out to be a great friend, and i do care about him still) and then Blake, the one night of passion leads to confusion and pain that hey, maybe this is good...and maybe men aren't scum...but then turns around to make up excuses or something, I'm still not sure.
But the point of this rambling is that I deserve a guy that's not like Alex...that's not a complete moron...who's going to achieve the impossible and make sure that I don't do anything stupid. I deserve something better than militant gun toting Republican assholes...
I got a license plate sticker at a diner and sure enough, when i opened the sticker, it said "Indiana" on it. Why in God's name is everything coming back to Indiana? Maybe it's because Alex never had any faith in me. Maybe no one has faith in me. What a horrible idea to think about! But I already have a plan to show Alex what I'm made of...he wanted to change me into this spineless housewife, and sure enough...I'll show him that Emily and Housewife never belong in the same sentence.
Dave 3 and I came up with a great idea. That i become speaker of the house if he's in congress and everytime he opens his mouth, I bang my wooden hammer thing on my seat high in the air and say, "Mr. Raggio, I think we've heard enough of you for today..." And it would be ever so great!!!
Believe me, Emily will go places while Alex ends up without a leg, sitting around a table at the local Muncie VFW...talking war stories with the others...

I'm very bored...so i wrote this introduction to a short story. It doesn't have a name but here it is.
“Nice shot!” Marcy had called to me from the patio of the house. I had the BB gun out for the first time since my high school days and I had just shot a squirrel. The squirrel was twitching his legs, a steady stream of blood was pouring from his torso. His bushy tail then lay limp and he died. Time of death: 4:54 PM 25 July.
I put the gun down on the lawn and walked towards her. She was wearing the dress I had bought her. I usually never bought her clothing, but the dress had called to me in the window while I was walking down the street on the way to work. It said, “Allen…Allen, turn and look at me. Yes, wouldn’t Marcy look great with me wrapped around her body?” I just nodded at the window, opened the glass double doors, and bought it without saying anything.
She looked at me with her eyes that were sparkling blue. And then she looked at the squirrel…and then back to me. She opened her lips and words came from her mouth. A question. “So what are you going to do with the dead squirrel in our backyard?”
I hadn’t actually thought about what I was going to do with the dead animal. Skin it and make myself mittens? Eat the meat and pretend to be on the Oregon Trail? I just didn’t want to throw it out. That wouldn’t be enough. That’s so ordinary, like road kill on the side of the road.
“I haven’t the foggiest.” I finally said after a lapse. “I’m thinking of making myself mittens.”
She laughed. “Don’t be stupid Allen. You work in marketing. You can’t tan and skin an animal.”
“Oh honey, you forget that I’m an Eagle scout.”

It's morning!
Last night, we all lay in bed: Me, Ross, and Jeremy...and Jeremy read us "Moonstruck in Manhattan" a cheesy romance novel and he did all the voices and everything! It was hillarious and so awesome. I had a lot of fun last night...seeing Leon conduct like the asshole he is, hanging out with Ross and Jeremy...it was really a nice day.
My mom and uncle Bill took me to the Beekman Arms for lunch...I sat in this greenhouse with all these pretentious New Yorkers talking about 2nd mortages and houses on the Cape.
I have just woken up to the dream I usually have...where I get a letter from Johnny Garrison...and the letter said on the cover, "Dont worry, Garrison's never going to leave you again..."
It's so funny how deep i've slipped...looking into my mailbox with such excitement only to realize that he's never going to write back...he's never going to do anything but sit in Texas with that smirk permanetly smeared on his pale little face.
Ross and I lay in bed last night talking about Blake. I was telling Ross the whole story, what was going on...how everything wasn't going to way I had wished...but Ross just smiled and told me it was okay. I still don't understand what's going on but all i know, it's not good and everything isn't going according to Emily's way. But I'm used to that...I'm telling Blake now not to worry because, I mean...this happens a lot. True, I've got this web of deception, but it's not that hard to break free...
I have just realized I have poison ivy...and I'm pissed as hell. If I even step within a mile of some form of forest, i'll get it. It sucks!
So as for the rest of the day: I have to clean my room that is messy as shit, read a book I hate, dillude myself into thinking there is a letter from Texas in my mailbox, and maybe take a nap seeing as Jeremy read to us till about four in the morning...and maybe write my final paper for class, seeing as it's due soon and I would like to get it off my chest as sooon as possible!
Oh, and as for Mars, it was much too cold and lonely so I'm back
so those who actually care, which most of you don't...she's baaaaccckkkkk....

I'm thinking of gouching my eyes out...and moving to mars.
I dont think anyone would protest my leaving. I think it would make everything better in the world.
My day today was just boring. I'm filling up space. That's another reason why I'm going to Mars. I dont take up space there. Because there is no one there.
I cut out a picture of Johnny Garrison and looked at it: The eyes, the smirk plastered on his fair skin, the way he looks at peace with himself. Sometimes that picture makes me sick to my stomach and sometimes that picture makes me think that I really was in love with him. Ha...what bullshit. Sometimes I wish i didn't put so much faith in people and watch them turn around to take a rusty spoon and stab you with it over and over and over and over...
But Isaac is talking to me again because he's over the MCAT's and he's ever so wonderful. I'm driving down to West Point to visit him and we're going to prance...it'll be so cute, i can't wait!
So I'm a drug...and now i have proof...how many men have been caught up in my fucking web of deception? I didn't even know i had one in the first place! I should feel proud that i can do this but i dont...it makes me feel horrible. I dont like my web...when i was 14 and fat and ugly...i always wanted to get what i wanted and now that i have, it's just not good...it comes with too much emotion...and yes, it's inspiration but i dont know...inspiration to write my pathetic self involved bullshit I call fiction?
Please stop reading this...and I'll stop writing...because I'm afraid im going to say things i don't mean, and dont want to have to explain myself to the adoring fans.
Tomorrow I leave for Mars...Farewell
I won't be missed...
Emily Who?

I'm not writing much tonight...only giving you a taste of the story that Peter Sourian wants me to write about Indiana...I dont have a title yet but here's the introduction:
I’ve always been a sucker as far back as I can remember. It’s kind of sad really, how my life repeats itself in this vicious cycle of up and downs. I am the human ocean you could say. My tides just go in and out, day after day, and everything happens on a time chart held by the coast guard, delicately lying out my chart with salty sweet fingers. So when something happens to be that’s extraordinary, when I meet someone that changes my entire framework and understanding about how I am going to live my life…the ocean changes and leaves a mark.
I’m growing a peninsula, as we know it. It’s jutting into my ocean space. It’s painful and I don’t like it that much. It’s ruining the ebb and flow of my life. This peninsula I have casually named “the military.”
The men in my life have all been strangely connected with the military. My first crush wanted to be in a fighter pilot. He is now in a state run mental hospital in Utah for a chemical imbalance. They say he snapped after my Halloween party. After October 31, 1997…I never saw him again. I blame myself for I heard from him my party was the last time he ever felt “bliss.”
My first boyfriend now attends the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. Though our relationship only lasted a few days, the impact was branded in my brain. I wrote my first novel about him, Irrational Hypothesis, a wailing angst story of love and the consequences of trying too hard for what you want in life. He’s convinced myself, as has most of his family that I was just a figment of his imagination…that I never existed in his pathetic and sheltered life.
And now this…this Middle Western escape, killing two birds with one stone and leaving shot in the heart by the M-16 of “justice.”
I mean, the peninsula gets bigger and bigger everyday and the pain is incredible.

So tonight was...awesome! All my friends and I gathered in the dormroom and took pictures...scary pictures, of us. If you go to my profile and go to my photo album, you can see them. They are nuts! There are a lot of me lookin' my hottest.
Today Peter Sourian told me that my play sucked and then he asked me the question, "Why are you obessed with the military?" And so i told him the story of Indiana and Alex. Peter Sourian thought the story i told of Alex was awesome and commanded me to write him the story of Indiana. I was like, "umm okay Sir."
I read Blake's blog today about prom. I feel bad...I'd go to prom with him if he wanted me to go with him! I love high school proms and such...with the big puff dress and all the primping and coolness...=)
All my friends are still here talking on the floor and it's almost 1 AM. It's nice and I'm a big fan of my friends. They are, crazy!
Well, tonight it will be a short journal entry...because tonight was draining. =)
Tonight my emotions are one of elation...that's a great word
"Hot Dog, we have a wiener!"
Goodnight psychos!