Letters to the Editor – Ch 2 by Lika Amanaka
When Life Hits You with A Sledge Hammer- A Quatre Winner fic
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You know how it is. One day you're picking strawberries in a merrily, sun-shiny, day-dreamy way when all of a sudden, wham! Life hits you with a sledge hammer! You go from up to down so fast you're left wondering who you are and what your name is cause you're too busy to remember.
You gotta do this, you gotta do that, you have to finish this and start that. Then in the middle of all this you gotta stop to eat, sleep, shower, sleep, shower, eat, shower again and maybe skip the eat and the sleep cause you know, you're a zombie slave anyway,. There'll probably be a feast of mashed brains for you to feed off of when your brain malfunctions and turns to mush. Or explodes from the constant stress, whichever comes first.
Why not just quit? You obviously bit off more than you can chew right? Wrong! I'm not a quitter, I'm a winner (cause I've never heard that one before, ha!).
You can't just be all like "this is hard" and "I cant do this anymore" or "I cant go on" and "I'll never let go"….wait…I think that last part's from a movie. Anyway, the world is banking on you (literally, my family owns half of all the banks in the world) to succeed. Oh the irony of saving the world only to be destroyed by it.
Alright I'm being over dramatic (or melodramatic, whatever you want to call it). It's just that it always all comes at you at once from all directions, instead of little tiny life packets compressed in zip files, you get mountained by a pile of paper that literally blocks you from view of the world and if it wasn't for the windows you wouldn't know if it were night or day anyway.
And on top of that, you're turning 25, out of nowhere! Now isn't that the icing on the cake? Wait, why are there only 24 candles? Did I miss a year? Oh! No, wait, its on the floor, I dropped one. Or did I miss a year? Cause I swear its going by too fast, I don't even know how! Wait, yes I do, never mind.
And then you get your family "whining and complaining" about how you're not married yet, and wouldn't you like their help finding that someone special? And you're all like "Hellooo? Kind of busy here, dealing with Life! Sorry, Marriage, can I reschedule you to next Wednesday? Say between Now and Never? Oh? Your watch doesn't have a "now" and "never"? Fine, come at 2pm then and I'll leave a memo to myself to just ignore the phones and doorbell at that time, thanks and good bye."
And then there's your friends. God bless them, if it wasn't for them you'd be a very boring old fart, turning a quarter of a century old and all. They cheer you on, help you hold it together, glue you back together when you fall apart. They may not be all the king's horses or all the king's men, but they have enough anatomical knowledge to put my head and heart back in the right places. I mean your head and heart. This isnt about me, it's about you and how life hit you with a sledge hammer (and then stole all your pens…where are all my pens? Are they like socks in the dryer? Vanishing to a world beyond what we can see and touch?).
My God, I've turned into an old man, rambling on and on about things people don't care to hear about in the first place so they get stuck in a nursing home with unqualified nurses to deal with them.
Where was I? Oh right, sledge hammer. Sledge hammers don't belong in merry, sun-shiny, day-dreamy worlds! It's not my fault Life was sleeping like a dormant volcano when I was trying to wake it up and get it going. Now its like a sugar high toddler who discovered its feet and stairs at the same time. All "you cant catch me, na na na boo boo". But what happens when you do catch up with Life? You get a few days break and then, wham! You get thrown back into the cyclical pattern? No, I don't mean cynical, I mean cyclical, a revolving pattern. Anyway, you get my drift and if you don't by now you're probably pretty daft anyway or a zombie ate your brain cause it turned to mush reading this.
All they did was ask me to write a letter to the editor to commemorate my 25th year in existence and I went all (enter any famous actor who lost his cool and went on an 8 minute angry tirade to those in the general vicinity) on paper. Gotta say though, at least it wasn't boring right? ^_~
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AN: Quatre's narrative switched multiple times from "I" to "you", this was written that way on purpose. You can choose to think of it as if he were talking to himself and the audience while writing (like thinking outloud/rehearsing outloud before making a speech) or even go further and say he's not quite right in the head after his whole "Wing Zero turned my brain to mush" episode…poor guy lol.
The whole "cyclical vs cynical" thing was inspired by my favourite show Corner Gas. Major credit go to the writers of the show, and creator Brent Butt, super funny guys!
Oh, and movie that was referenced hit theatres recently in 3D. If you haven't guess after that hint, it was Titanic, although I'm not sure I quoted it word for word, credit due to James Cameron, amazingly well written story!
Hope you had as much fun reading this quirky bit as I did writing it! Reviews welcome!
