Forgo the Living, Forgo the Day: A Wordle Inspired Short
We all surely know by now that Wordle has taken Twitter by storm and become a hugely familiar face among the writing community online. Over at OverWoods, we truly love the game and as a kind of pseudo tribute (and a not so subtle way to remember to keep up that Wordle streak!), we've decided to use each daily, 5 letter answer as the inspiration to a short story or poem this May!
*Of course, we wouldn't want to reveal the answer of the day's Wordle prematurely and ruin the experience for others. So, every Wordle inspired short is brought to you the day after its inspiration hit your screen. This is a no spoiler zone! We promise.
This short is brought to you by our blogger, Megan Oberholzer.
Author comment: Yesterday's Wordle answer was "forgo", and it inspired me to write todays short story "Forgo the Living, Forgo the Day", an energy-filled window into the life a maladaptive daydreamer exchanging a dull life for a barrage of twisted fantasies from their own dysfunctional dreamwork. I hope you enjoy!
Forgo the Living, Forgo the Day (01/05/2022)
I cannot stop wasting time. And I cannot tell you when things turned for me this way.
On the thick, baking days of summer, where the streets shimmer in and out of focus and the concrete peels away from apartment walls, dripping molten and vapid onto passing cars, I stay in suspension. On my back, atop the sheets. Mouth thick with silence. Pillow jutting, uncomfortable, rotting, always caught in a dream.
It is lucid but steered, vile yet welcome and eagerly hosted. Every sweating fantasy – mothers holding cursed, bleeding children, fathers banishing their worthy, loving sons, daughters flying into the night on ill-fated adventures, for strength, for autonomy, for love of life, sex, torture, rebirth, revisiting – every broken fantasy begotten with some fine remnant of my own will to live. My own despairs. My own suppressed desires.
In honesty, I have always had a fondness for fairy tales, and yet not the sparkling, joyous power stories of youth and innocence, but the dark, glaring origins, branded Brother’s Grim, or better yet, unexplained and wickedly mysterious like the lyrics of every nursery rhyme, their heritages long forgotten.
As the cicadas die outside my window, dead on their backs against the granite ledge, and the sun rolls a long arch across the sky, I disappear into my own fairy web of bitter karma and bloodied irony, and watch life as it unfolds into itself, half-daydream, half-nightmare.
Every dawn, I palm off the day, the duties, the people who knock relentlessly on my doors, my windows, the blinds closed, the peephole painted with black. I watch two sinners, their eroticism, their love, the burning sweetness of flesh on flesh. I sympathise with their willingness, reflected in them that desire to spiral into destruction and rise with unspeakable grace into their own eternal hell.
Just like yesterday's post, I had some fun here too. It's a little dark and dingy, which I hope you don't mind, but with any luck, my faithful dedication towards that iconic piece of writing advice "don't just write words. Write music." pulled you through.
So, a little about the process; today's piece was a little easier to put together than yesterday's since I gleefully skipped straight to Pinterest and started browsing. Like before, I chose the first written quote I could find and merged that into my story idea (I just love me a strong, restrictive brief - but each to their own!)
I found this quote posted originally to tumbler by cryptomnesia:
“I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn’t even tell you anything that I saw. I didn’t talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.”
- Yiwei Chai, The Jacardanda Years (via crowsummer)
You can clearly see in my piece where I lifted and tweaked some phrases to suit my story and better tie my inspiration into my piece. It's up to you to decide whether or not this works well.
Overall though, I think I did a pretty good job at picking up some of the "vibes" of the quote and weaving it into my story, even outside of lifted phrases. Although, I will humbly admit that this post is most likely getting at something different than maladaptive daydreaming (MD); I think it leans more towards procrastination, potentially the effects of depression, however, I don't know the first think about Yiwei Chai, so I couldn't begin to tell you the true, real-life connections this quote is making.
For me, when it comes to the depiction of MD, I just wanted to relate the experiences in the quote to something I was familiar with and could draw on, my own way of writing what I know. Maybe because of this, something in my piece might just resonate with you and ring fundamentally true.
Some aspects are a little outside of my comfort zone being born British where its murky and soggy all the time, especially with the mention of cicadas and the hot, shimmering streets. Would you have thought I wasn't a native Australian (?), Southern American (?), Mexican (?), person from a place where it gets really hot while cicadas make concerningly loud noises (?)? (I . . . my A* in GCSE Geography means nothing to me anymore.)
Either way, I hope this was a good read. Let me know what you thought below (VV ~follow the arrows~ VV) and don't forget to check out some of our other posts on the OverWoods blog!