Friction Fiction Part 2

James had been my colleague at the newspaper with we were both fresh faced cadets keen to use the written word as ours sword and battle against the whole world and bring the colour of truth to the black and the white of the daily paper.

But James was a little smarter than I was, actually a lot more diplomatic. And since he in fact took other peoples feelings into consideration before he spoke, he gave himself the chance to actually be liked by our fellow workers.

I on the other hand, from almost day one, deftly ran rough shod over other peoples ideas thoughts and feelings with almost clock work precision. Hence the reason he was promoted to the police beat and I was relegated to the classifieds, doing what I strangely came to be far too good at. Writing obituaries and phrasing the achievements of a lifetime into a bitter sweet paragraph of bold face and italic type.

This suited me for the first five years and slowly, invisibly my mind switched off and I ran on a sort of automatic pilot. Until one night out with James he uncharacteristically blew up into a rage at me for some cruel thing I had said in an attempt to be glib about the writing style of one journalist we both knew.

“For fuck’s sake martin!” he exploded, “At least Billy DOES actually make an effort to do better and find a new and better way to get the story across to the reader. He tries!”

What the hell do you do with your degrees??!” he asked then answered himself, “bloody nothing at all!” you pour on the syrup and write bitter sweet lamentations for dead politicians and 90 year old war heroes.”

At the time I was 3 parts drunk and numb from the alcohol, but still the words cut straight through and stung me. I was shocked then amused that James had broken out of his well groomed diplomacy and let loose the guns of disappointment on me. Still this did not take the sting away, in the following weeks and months the sting burned deeper into my skin and made me think that maybe he was right. Maybe I had taken the easy road and put my mind to sleep and sold out to laziness.

That spring I took annual leave, much to the relief of my boss. I decided to take a trip back home to see my mother. She was pleased to see me since it was rare that she heard from me or I called her back. Once back in my own room I sifted through the museum my mother had made of the room and looked through all the things I had written about at high school then university. The style through the years changed from rough and vague to sometimes focused and engaging and I read the articles and exposes I did for the university review and local papers. But the element that slowly took the burn away was the theme running through the words in each line I had written was the passion I felt to really say what needed to be said about the injustice of the issue at hand. My sword was sharp and ran black with ink as I slayed the blank pages making them scream out what I needed to say.

To be continued…