Notes on 'Fish', My life, and death

(Draft)

Day 01

31-12-23

I have no idea how I will write the story of “Fish”. I have only the concept of the story but not the mechanics, the structure, character and logic (believable quality). And I feel stupid about it. I guess that is a staple feeling for those who are not genius like HER, such imaginative, descriptive woman, every time my eyes locate her, this thought comes rushing: she is the perfect opposite of me. Is it because she was born at the same year and date as me? I don’t know. What I do know is, she is a perfect version of me.

She is a Da Vinci, I am a doodler

She is beautiful, and I am me

Her Hand-writing is Art in itself , where mine is barely readable

What I am trying to say is, she is the one who is supposed to write and illustrate this kind of story because it suits her. She is the one who is supposed to worry about how to conjure an event out of thin air, and make the story sense, not ME! I am just an insect. I am not supposed to worry about this high-class thing, I am supposed to be buried six feet under and finally be useful to the mother earth.

Instead, I am sitting on the sofa and wrecking my brain on how to grow this story from its seed.

 

Day 02

1-1-24

And the seed is this. A boy has a small fish inside his belly! Not real fish of course. that would be silly. An imaginative, metaphorical one. Personification of our emotion.

This seed came to me, If I remember correctly, seven years ago. Just this image of a boy, curiously looking at his tummy, where the fish (Goldfish?) staring back at him. Why this image conjured in my mind? I do not know or remember what incident specifically caused it, but I think/believe, the question of what makes people react, and explaining the idea to myself, may be the inspiration.

Inspiration are plenty but my effort is none.

My wish to enter the jungle of storytelling marks in the year 2011. After reading a lot of youth magazine and Aesop’s Fables, I felt the urge to imitate those writers, especially horror, as it was trending at the time. So, I picked pencil and paper and wrote a ghost story wrapped with moral lesson (“greed kills”). Though I wish to tell you more about the story in detail but alas I cannot recall the plot. To me it seemed great. I felt like a conqueror after finishing the story. Then I did what  any 11-year-old novice would do, showing the first draft, without checking for error, to a senior. In my case it was my sister. Yes, her opinion was positive, certainly biased. After laboring on it for days, just “good” sounded understatement, so I made the second mistake of asking for a second opinion to a guy who was happened to be in the house. I was happily and proudly presented my first ever pencil-written story to him. Even though he criticized just the way I wanted him to, but the honesty was too much for a first time storywriter like me. I was devastated.

That night, I took an erasure and rubbed out the words I had written with love and care. I took an oath that day that I will write a better and original story. Days, months, years gone by, but the “original” story never came (or I never I gave the effort). Lack of storytelling exercise drove me to depression and depression attracted swarms of poems, of which I have swatted some of them to paper (Din Diyechi Mepe). After suffering from fever of poetry, my soul finally gave in and suspension came. Stories, poetry and words ceased to exist. from 2015 to 2017.

As time, that old gypsy, kept on going on the back of its ceaseless, fierce horse, my body was painfully growing. It was so insufferable to me that I wished for death, every single second, wherever I was.

When death, my desired death, finally arrived, I was shocked. I did not expected death in this form. Never realized death could be subtle, abstract. But death is death. When it embraces you, you do not step back. You embrace. So I embraced, and wept. It was 2018.

 

_

 

Why do we lie? To run away from things? To save ourselves from shame? From truth? I do not know about you but I lie to myself so I could forget the obvious boring answer or fill the void with vain explanations. For instance, I always ponder why some are genius while some are not, why some struggle, while others strive to the top. The obvious answer to this are, (to answer the first) because of the perfect and imperfect gene; (to answer the second) lack and plenty of motivation and skill. This straight forward answer does not satisfy me, so I plucked a seed of “truth” from the nature, planted it in my mind and let it grow.  According to the fruit of my “truth”, the reason of genius and not-genius dilemma is simply because, people are born only from two ways – from Petal, comes the able-mind and body person, the genius person. From Insect, comes the opposite, not-genius person. And the origin of this “truth” situates not on earthly sphere but above and far, beyond human conscious could reach.

When I close my eyes, I arrive at this place, a plain that stretches far and wide like the deserts in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, but unlike the desert, I see countless flowers, bloomed. Swaying back and forth in a tide. Periodically, I see portals appear here and there, petal snaps from the flower and zoom into the portal, and after travelling through a tunnel, the petal pops up in a female host, takes shape, and grows from there.  

2/01/2024

..with this attitude i set out to resolve another confusion. why do people react the way they do and unlike my 'petal concept', this is truly confusing to me as i am an absent-minded insect who lives among the living. 

In my mind, i only see a small portion of larger narrative, a small boy (of eleven?), confused by  his families nonstop bickering, went out and encounter a small but life altering event. He saw a madman, wearing nothing but  ...

 Day 3

a tattered pants, on the middle of the road with a fishing rod without a fishing line, appears as if he is pulling a big invisible fish out of an invisible reservoir. the boy that right by his side an old man stood in curious pose, paralyzed, mouth agape, hands folded close to chest, which is bulging forward. Yes, they are connected as our young protagonist suspected. what is happening in this scene is, what i call, "fishing". 

the old man is suffering from depression, his daughter had died recently from a road crash and she was the only one in his life he truly cared, she was only married for six months and this caused him sadness which muddled the spiritual water inside him and attracted a predator fish 'depression'. It killed his aged-soul fish and started spewing eggs. just then our savior arrives, the half-naked stinking-madman, who is secretly a member of a spiritual guardians, and pulls out the fish from the old mans chest. Now, question may arise in your mind, do the people have witnessed this event like out boy? yes and no. yes, they have seen the whole. and no, because they could not comprehend what they have seen and forget immediately when the event stopped. 

3/01/2024

only the chosen one, for instance, the boy, will be able to see and remember this odd and fantastic scene. that is the difference between a normal person and a chosen one. 

Day 4

And  I am stuck in this scene. and it seems like i am stuck forever here. the boy comes, sees the event,  it rattles his mind, gets impressed by the Madman and the scene ends with an ominous foreshadowing from the madman. and then what? i know what other points should i touch, what i do not know is how do i write it or what are the appropriate words to describe the scene that sets the tone. To elaborate on this point, for instance, i know what comes after the first scene is a family feud, where they boy loses all his patients and reaches the zenith of his confusion state. on the next scene, maybe days/weeks later, as the boy lives in a zombie state, performs poorly in academics, shunned himself from friends and family and all kinds of fun and writes poem (which is not a good thing) as he is about to do some drastic, he comes face to face to the madman. on the next scene, we see the typical explanation narrative. the madman shows him the world of fish, explains the inner-physics of the world. and he behaves like a fish out water and awes at everything (along with the reader). 

from 3:30 to 6:30 spend walking to the Railway Station and snapped some photographs 

and now at 11:30 pm - on the bed 

(Random though) 

I am shouting on top of my voice

covering my ears with my hand

i do not know for how long

my throat is severely dry and sore

my ears are hot and damp

i do remember why i am shouting

should i stop?

i stopped shouting

i bring my hands down

sound of scream filled my ears

and opened my eyes and saw countless others, screaming, shouting, making indecipherable noise

i could not stand it

i covered my ears

and started shouting to sink the other noises down.

until i forget.

this random thought occurred after watching a series called severance, named after a fictional surgical process where a chip is planted inside in an individuals brain, which keeps a persons work memory and home memory separate. it's done by company that ...(unfinished)

Now is should get back to the story, fish, which is patiently waiting for me. One giant hurdle that is stands between me and my story is the question, how do i begin?

I have established that the boy is emotionally confused, does not understand why people not react to things the way they are supposed to react? 

(random thought)

I waste time 

like it is a commodity

available everywhere

and I am a prosperous man

who could afford to buy whatever amount if it

5/01/2024 (listening to the soundtrack of the movie 'Decision To Leave': "seorae" on loop)

It is 2024, nearly a decade i have been writing, no thinking about writing stories, when I was going to the Madrasha, talking to friends, in classroom, during exam (yep!), until i receved the news about my failure, then everything flushed from my brain, and started living in a white space. But old, stubborn stories refuse to leave and bug me to be written on paper. And my inability, worthlessness, stops me from doing it. when i was alive (Before 2017) i had enough fuel to write books after books, now, after death? that fuel, my imagination, is a matter of the living. 

So how should I proceed it? 

*

i firmly believe i was born to write stories

not to run behind successs

not to run behind procreation

to write stories and die.

Note: I spent rest of the time writing SweetMare from 5/01/24 to 16/02/24, hence, I could not write Notes. Will add more whenever possible.