FanficTalk Archive
Unleash Your Fandom
I can definitely relate to this one. Loitering on the periphery of a party or lurking in a corner with a drink in hand, more comfortable watching than participating. It takes an immense amount of effort to interact with new people, and introverts often need plenty of time to recover after social events. It can be so daunting to strike up a conversation with someone we don't know, even if quite often the anticipation is more exhausting than the conversation itself...I have been there at times with a not-particularly-enjoyable drink in hand, thinking 'should I? Shouldn't I?' about introducing myself, and ended up just watching the proceedings instead. And observing people interact is often so fascinating, right? I find it super useful for writing scenes and describing body language, just watching two strangers in conversation or a group engaged in an activity.
I like how she gets to half-past nine, a perfectly respectable time to leave a party, and she'sprobably been looking forward to that moment when she can leave since she arrived(!), but when it comes to it, she finds she's enjoying being there more than she might have anticipated she would.
Another great interpretation - thank you for sharing!
M <3
Hi Chiara!
This one was a surprise! I wasn't expecting that ending, lol; what a delightful interpretation of 'hide'! At first, I thought the subject may have been hiding from something sinister, the way he's trying so hard to avoid detection. The 'every man for himself' line rings so true - in times of high stress, we can often only think about saving ourselves. I was holding my breath for him, wondering whether he'd moved from his hiding place too soon, whether the person he was hiding from would double back and discover him...what they'd do if/when they caught him. So suspenseful! And yes, a hand to hold right now would probably be welcome...
But what joy he must have had in calling out 'Safe'! And Yay for retaining his position at the top of the 'hide-and-seek' tree ;)
This was unexpected and super fun!
M <3
This is an interesting piece, Chiara. This feeling, the feeling of being alone in a crowd, has been written about many times before. Some authors might interpret this situation as sad or difficult, the thoughts of a person wanting to make connection with other people but failing to achieve that. And yet your narrator sounds pretty matter-of-fact about it, describing it without becoming emotional. A dispassionate description of the characrteristics of being alone in a crowd.
The final line of this piece shows it for what it is. The speaker doesn't mind being alone. It's a conscious choice, given the circumstances. Sometimes you have time to stop and chat with those around you, and sometimes you just don't because you are already late for another appointment. Maybe next time, when you're not in such a hurry. :)
Hi Chiara, just dropping by with a quick review <3
You know me, I always love the use of a word with more than one potential meaning, and 'grave' here could be a noun or an adjective, or both. This is such a sad piece, especially when she's having that conversation and telling him about things that have happened. It's often the little day-to-day details we miss not being able to share with someone more than the big events, right? Especially the moments like 'our son phoned' or being able to comment on the neighbour's geraniums with someone who would get the gist of the convo.
I found the colours and imagery in this drabble to be really soothing and peaceful; the colours of the flowers and the green leaves against the white marble, and the caress of the breeze against her cheek - or was it his hand? And I like to think that the person arranging the flowers and talking to her dearly departed also found some peace in doing so, through the melancholy of the sun setting on another evening.
Really lovely. Thank you for sharing.
M <3
Hi Chiara!! I'm back for more...
This one really resonated with me, especially the statement 'too old and too alone to enjoy' which hit me in so many ways - being surrounded by people of a different (younger) generation at work, having very different hobbies to my peers, having hobbies which make me feel my age(!), feeling a strange sense of guilt at enjoying something that maybe should have been left behind with childhood?
I get the 'staying silent when everyone else is making a noise' too, letting everyone else compete for air time knowing there's little point in trying to make my voice heard.
Some sensations - the adrenaline rush of a white-knuckle ride, for example - are often best appreciated alone when you don't have to look out for anyone else, just yourself. You can just lose yourself in that moment of madness...but at the same time wondering who's judging you for being there on your own. First time I went to the cinema on my own felt like this; I loved the freedom of watching the film alone, but the insecure part of me wondered what opinions other people were forming of me :/
I'm curious about the man who this piece is about. Is he old in age terms or just in relation to the crowd around him, or is his age all in his own head? Does he simply feel old? It takes a certain bravery to going to a place like the funfair alone, when all around are groupls and couples and families - single people wandering around on their own are probably in the minority.
When he walks away 'empty-handed' - because there's nothing tangible to take away from that moment of exhilaration - I really feel for this guy not reliving the memories and enjoying the moment all over again in his own head. Maybe he thought his waltzer ride would provide something that it didn't?
Another thought-provoking drabble.
M <3
Chiara! Thought I'd drop in to revisit and explore this collection of drabbles whilst I wait for a TSW update (no pressure!!) <3
Envy is such an isolating emotion, right? It reminds us of what we haven't got, what separates us from others who have, and once it's got a hold, it takes strength from itself, growing stronger on its own. It's one of those destructive feelings that we all get from time to time and it often can't be helped. Fortunately, in many cases, it's just fleeting and superficial - 'I wish I had straight hair like her!' or 'I wish I could afford nice clothes like they can'. But sometimes, it's way deeper than that and it lingers, destroys us from the inside out. I love the way you've described envy as a gaslighter - 'it's all in your head, that's what they want you to believe' - I've not thought about it in that way before.
As always, beautifully constructed and written. Thank you for sharing
M <3
An interesting moment, solitude in the middle of a crowd, but not simply the solitude of just standing and waiting, but solitude even while enjoying (or maybe I should just say 'participating) in a boisterous group activity.
That was an interesting choice of words, "too old and too alone to enjoy." There's this unspoken expectation that fun-filled events are supposed to be social, supposed to be enjoyed with companions, family, friends. There's even a feeling that it's dangerous to do these things alone -- someone might mug you, or you might get hurt and no one will find you. And then of course the feeling that it's somehow improper for old people to express strong emotions having to do with simply having fun.
I wonder why the old man loses his feeling of happiness so quickly after the fun ride is over. Maybe because he has no one to to with about it? Perhaps that's part of the fun, talking about it for a few breathless sentences after the ride ends and we all stagger off the platform.
Oh, this is so sweet, yet melancholy. The use of many color words for the vase of flowers, the sunset, and the black and white tomb really make the scene so vivid, and the evening hour makes the setting so peaceful in the empty cemetery. It's plain that this woman comes to the grave of her husband often, bringing flowers as if he could see and smell them, and talking about her daily life as if he could hear her. And I get the sense that the more times she does this, the more true it becomes for her. Maybe he really does hear her and see the flowers. After all, we just don't know, do we?
This is a clever Reflection on Solitude. I was trying to figure out who the person was, and where they were, and why they were hiding, so desperately not wanting to be found, scarcely daring to breathe, then moving as quickly as possible without making a sound. All sorts of scary scenarios appeared in my mind, and then it turns out to be just a game of indoor hide and seek! That was a funny ending, so unexpected.
You did a very good job in creating the fear and suspense in the first 3 paragraphs, although there was probably more fear in the minds of the readers than in the mind of the hider, After all, he knows it's just a game.
A cute idea!
The subject of this Reflection is a familiar feeling, though perhaps not always so intense. To be close to someone in a spatial sense but to realize that there is no connection. To walk past soemone's house (so close) , but no one opens the door and steps out. To be in possession of some article that belongs to them, accidentally left behind at the library or the coffee shop, picked up surreptitiously and not given back.
It can be a longed-for connection that never existed except in dreams. Someone who sits next to you but never acknowledges your presence. Or it can be a connection that once did exist but is abolished now. That's bad enough if it fades away slowly, but much worse if it is sudden. Especially if we never know why.
Oh, my. I hope this young man's plan is a little bit more than just 'vague' at least as regards practical matters. This story reminds me of how life was, back in the sixties and seventies when you could really do something like this, before society got so crazy.
But you are right -- the fear of the unknown can have a paralyzing effect. Maybe that's why group tours are popular. You just sign up and pay a hefty sum of money and you get your 10-day all-planned tour of Ireland or France or wherever, with no decisions to make and no unpleasant surprises or emergencies. I hope that this young man gets to see a lot of fabulous things (ancient temples?) and meet a lot of nice people before his money runs out entirely. Whether or not he finds himself, he'll certainly have some memoraable adventures.
Thank you for writing this little piece about solitude of a different sort. Perhaps he won't stay solitary for long.
Vicki
This was an unusual topic for the Reflections on Solitude. Dissociative Amnesia. I had to look it up and read about it. It is triggered by experience of some sort of trauma. Luckily, according to what I read, it usually goes away by itself eventually, with treatment. But the poor person in this drabble semms to be having a partcularly hard time with it. Weeks have gone by, with no improvement. I can see that such a thing could be discouraging and even frightening. What if my memory never comes back?
It makes me wonder if a person like the speaker in this drabble might never spontaneously remember these people, their names and faces, but I wonder if the speaker could relearn all the names as if they were all strangers being met for the first time. In other words, to begin to build new memories about them, even if the old ones never come back.
It makes me wonder what the traumatic event was that triggered all this. I guess we'll never know. Thanks for writing about this strange topic.
Vicki
This is a good take on the theme of solitude: the sensation of being alone in the midst of a crowd. As adults we sometimes feel this way, even when we're not lost, even when we know the way back to our car and back to our home. But just imagine th panic of a child who becomes separated from his parents and can't see a familiar face anywhere, or the panic of the parents when they realize tht their child has disappeared. Then I think of the fear and desperation of an elderly person who has become forgetful and disoriented, who goes out by himself or herself for a walk or a drive and can't remember how to get home, and who keeps walking or driving farther and farther away, sometimes with a tragic outcome that is reported in the newspapers. (Big sigh)
But in your drabble there is a happy ending. The little child has just had a good scare, and hopefully he will remember how this event felt and will be more careful in the future. A good idea for this drabble. Thank you for writing!
Vicki
Yes, kneading dough is a task best done in solitude, or at least without interruption. The dough might be a little sticky at first, but it quickly becomes elastic under the steady rhythm of fold, push, and rotate 90 degrees, turn after turn, sweeping a little more flour under the dough periodically.
I try to figure out exactly what the kneader is making -- some kind of bread dough, which can be shaped into any sort of form. My imagination has added some yeast to the list of ingredients. Yes, when you re-create some cooking skills that were handed down from generations before you, you remember your mother and grandmother, the source of the traditions. I learned today at a gathering of women my own age, that none of them had ever learned to pull the tendons out of the turkey legs with a pair of pliers before roasting the turkey for Thanksgiving or Christmas. My mother and grandmother always did, and my children now do it also. Much better without the tendons.
The music is a good addition to the process. :)
Nice little drabble!
Vicki
Hi, Chiara. Here is the fourth of the four drabble reviews that I am doing as a swap for one (longer) chapter of one of my stories, either the final chapter of Dark Enough To See The Stars or the most recent chapter of The Crofter and The Snake, whichever you'd like.
I'm working my way through your list of drabbles, and it's a propos to comment on the ocean since I have been watching YouTube videos about the tsunamis that have occurred in the past (and will occur in the future) along the coast of the Pacific Northwest when the Cascadia Subduction Zone snaps again, giving us a 9.0 earthquake and a massive tsunami. (We are overdue for that; they occur every 250 years, on the average, and the last event was on January 27, 1700.)
Your character in this drabble, the observer of the ocean, sounds like an adult, someone old enough to have observed the seashore over many years. But he thinks only of the waves coming up on the sand and then flowing back again, making no more large movements than the twice-daily advance and retreat of the tide. Has he ever seen a hurricane or typhoon? Maye they don't occur in the place where he lives. And definitely not tsunamis. If he stops to think about it, he must admit that the ocean is a sleeping giant, unstoppable. But he's not thinking about it this evening. And, as we all surely realize, until you have lived through one of those phenomena, you cannot imagine what it is like.
Thank you for all these little drabbles. I will be back to review more of them the next time I need to give you some reviews!
Hi, Chiara, here again for a review for our most rrecent review swap. This drabble got me to thinking about how i play a keyboard instrument -- a piano or my old parlor organ, which is powered by foot pedals that fill the bellows. I think about the kinds of music I play -- classical, lyrical, not often downright thunderous, though there are definitely piano and forte sections.
The organ is kind of different from the piano. In order to increase the volume, you have to pump the pedals harder, and you have to start this harder pumping a few bars before the beginning of the section that you want to be forte because it takes a few seconds of extra pumping to raise the air pressure in the bellows. So you have to think ahead, anticipating how you want the music to sound, and there is a certain satisfaction in doing that. You feel good as you approach the loouder parts and your legs start working harder, and you can feel the music starting to swell. It's a whole-body effort to produce the music. A different kind of experience.
And the fingering is different on the organ because there's no sostenuto pedal. If you lift your hand off the keyboard, that entire chord instantly stops, so to move from one chord to another without odd gaps, I use an 'inchworm' type of fingering, in which i always keep at least one key depressed until the rest of the subsequent chord is in place. A challenge, but it's better when there is a challenge, isn't it?
It's fun to think about these things. Thank you for writing.
Hi, Chiara. Here again for our most recent swap. It is interesting to read this drabble in August of 2023, when the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic is just a memory now. fading in the distance. I try to think back to how I felt at that time. I worked in a critical occupation, so we never closed down, although we drastically changed the way we interacted with our clientele. We all wore masks, and the nature of the work kept us fairly well distanced, and our boss got us on the fast track to get vaccines -- we were some of the first. Church went online, important meetings went online, unimportant meetings just didn't happen (not much loss there). Big annual events didn't happen, so those of us who had to plan and run the big annual events had a year off from all that work :) I wrote Tiramisu in seven weeks. For extraverts, who are happy only when surrounded by people, it must have been hard.
Now we are in a new season of flu and respiratory diseases and this year's version of Covid. But even so, it is better than what came before. We will never forget, at least not those of us who lived through the pandemic, but now we await this year's flu shot and updated Covid booster (in one shot, hopefuly) in the middle of September. Our annual custom from now on.
Hi, Chiara. Here for our most recent swap. It is so easy to identify with these lines. Heavy spates of rain clatter on the roof and on my car, but usually the rain doesn't come in such heavy bursts where I live. The rumbles of thunder are also not common; we rarely have lightning here. But the streets, usually filled with strollers, dog-walkers, bicyclists, and students training for their cross-country teams, are empty. Even motorists are few although they can stay dry inside their cars, but they want to stay home; the errands can be posponed to another day.
Satisfaction when it rains -- the lawns and gardens are watered without my having to haul the hoses and sprinklers around (and pay big water bills at the end of the month). The rain is helping to hold the wildfires in check and assist the firefighters in their work. It fills the reservoirs to forestall the dreaded word 'drought'. Rain in the valleys means snow in the mountains and our greatest wish -- a good snowpack this winter that will provide us with the water we will need next summer.
An interesting conjunction -- photography and solitude. When we're taking pictures, we're often with other people, and those people are often images in our pictures. Or maybe we're at a place like a beach or a street fair or an outdoor concert, where there are many people, all of whom may be strangers to us, but even so, we're not alone, strictly speaking.
Some of my favorite pictures are the very close-ups of nature -- a twig with leaves all rimmed in frost, a pattern of ice crystals on the surface of a frozen marsh, tiny bits of nature, just them, you and the camera. These are the pictures I save. I like your line "Each click is a memory, to freeze and collect..."
Nice job on all these drabbles.
Being alone in a society/cuture different from your own can make you feel very alone. Sometimes we travel with family members or at least a group of our fellow countrymen, a little bubble of familiarity around us, a group we can fit into. And sometimes we travel alone, wondering if the people in this foreign place resent the arrival of the American tourist who wanders around their town without belonging there, trying to speak their language and garbling it with their American accent. I try to blend in, pretend I'm one of them as I walk down their streets (if our physical appearances sort-of match), trying not to do any of those things you see listed on the internet ("How Europeans Can Tell You Are An American") and then wondering if that's cheating? How can we bridge the divide?
An interesting idea, that one could have a personal Wonderland where you can be whatever you want to be, and nothing goes wrong, and no external resposibilities or expectations are placed on you. Of course it is all in your own head, where no one else can see it. Imagine if you had to write it down as an essay and turn it in to someone else for grading and criticism! How terrible that would be! No, best to keep it safe inside you head, always accessible, growing and expanding as the years go by,, evolving and maturing. Everyone is the hero of his own story, they say, and you are the hero of yours. Not your night-time dreams, of course; they're always stupid -- you can't find your clothes, you can't find your house -- but the perfect kind of dreams, where there are no disappointments, and everything you try is a success. :)
This drabble describes something that is so familiar to me -- watching the clock, wanting to be out of there (wherever you are), maybe to do something more interesting, or maybe just to collapse on the sofa and not move. What is it? A lingering disease that leaves you wiped out, weeks after the doctor says you're not contagious anymore? A too-long To-Do list that keeps you working non-stop until you suddenly have nothing more to give? Or even an injudicious fitness regime that leaves you with aching muscles and low blood sugar? Do we feel guillty about simply sitting on the sofa and reading a book instead of doing something active?
I like that line "...the need to cling to this one just a little bit longer." I know the feeling -- too tired to get up off the sofa and get ready for bed, to put on pajamas or brush one's teeth, and hoping that something interesting will appear on the TV or in the already-read newspaper, altlhough it's hard to pay attention without constantly falling asleep.
A nice little feeling to focus on. :)
Hi, Chiara,
Very good advice. Even a person who is not overthinking the past or worrying about the future can be guilty of squandering their time. Benjamin Franklin made a famous statement: "Dost Thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of."
It's so easy to say, "I'll do that next year (clean out the garage, go visit Skye or those museums of Baroque art, finish writing C&S...). When you're young, your life appears to stretch infinitely far ahead, and there are many decades left, so it's true that you can do it 'next year.' But the older you get, the starker becomes the reality that there are only so many years left (if you're lucky), and you cannot afford to pass up opoportunities. Something that we should all be reminded of, and contemplate regularly. Thanks for the reminder.
Hi chiara,
What a cute twist to the end of this drabble. We assume at first that the speaker is a human being on earth, and then discover that it is a being on another planet far away, but very human-like in its wondering about the possibility of life somewhere out there in the cosmos. This is not a scary or dangerous alien at all, wanting to conquer or destroy Earth, but just a philosophical and apparently peaceful creature.
Perhaps you have seen the remarks by William Shatner, the actor who played the role of Captain James Kirk in the Star Trek TV series and movies, after he had come back from his fairly recent journey into outer space (a sub-orbital flight, but it felt like space travel). He said that when looking back at the earth, a blue marble hanging in the blackness of space, he felt not exhilaration but deep sadness when he realized how tiny and fragile our planet is, in the vastness of space, which, so far as we know now, does not contain anything else like it. We should all have that experience.
Hi Chiara,
You have captured the spirit of the introvert here, the person who gains their energy, not from the hustle and bustle of external events and people, but from deep in the internal workings of their own minds, which can become clear and blossom like a flower opening up, only in the stillness and silence of solitude. Their batteries become recharged, so to speak, until they must leave their creative, life-giving state and return to the chaos of the outside world again.
Some people would identify with this state completely, would say, "Yes, that's it!' while others, who need the stimultion of the outside world to function, would not have the faintest idea what it is about.
Any access or use of the FanficTalk Archive is conditioned upon compliance with our Site Guidelines and Terms of Service and the Copyright Policy and Privacy Policy contained therein. Should you have any questions about them, you are very welcome to contact any of our archive validators. For advanced searching, please click here.
Any characters, source code, text, or titles contained herein which are recognizable as copyrighted material are the sole property of their owners.