Create a Story - Week 3

The experiment continues. This is week three and I am continuing with random prompts from the Create a Story book. 

This week’s prompt is from life experience (pg 67), and appropriately draws a little more on my personal experience than I am entirely comfortable with. 

I’d intended for these to be somewhat random lengths, but it seems they are running fairly consistently at 500 words a piece. Maybe that will continue. Maybe I will hit something that keeps me writing for longer. We will have to see.

Moments of Perfect Clarity

It’s always the small things. Perhaps, had I been looking, I would have seen myself on the verge of this cliff, where it waited, intense and deadly and terrifying all at once. Instead, I felt it, deep in my gut, with half my innards en route to the equator and the other half determined to find the North Pole. And just like my poor ill-used stomach and its proliferation of butterflies, I was balanced on a fence where I’d been unknowing and unseeing and yet influenced, ready to tip over.

It should be something big, to derail the force of destiny and reshape the path of a life forever. All the checkpoints of my life would change. It should be big. There was no decision. How could there be any decision? The direction of my life had changed. I had dragged the anchor of normalcy over the boundary and found clarity. And such clarity. Did other people feel this?

Did such a small thing affect others as it did me? He was popular. He had dark pretty eyes and long lashes that failed to make him feminine. But it was the drape of the blue shirt, the white tank, the chain falling over that deeply bronzed olive skin along his clavicle. It wasn’t just my stomach. It was my heart and my head and… well, yeah, that too, uncomfortably and too obviously so. Thankfully I was at an age where even that expression of horniness could be handwaved to teenage hormones. And I did.

But his neck, that chain, were like the links of bondage tying me to a remorse that would not go away. It was always there. Too many classes together and I ached for each one, hoping to arrive early enough that I could see him come in. Hope his powder-blue shirt would be open and loose or at least unbuttoned enough that I might glimpse that bit of him that never failed to make my heart race. So, I could hold it and store it and keep it in my memory to play over and over again in my head. As if somehow my guilt would be less if I obsessed more.

Each time my heart raced my mind couldn’t help but grow closer to an answer. Clarity might be ignored for a time, but not forever, not when the reminder was there, class after class, day after day… dream after terrifying dream. 
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I knew at night when my hand made its inevitable journey that I’d crossed the line. I’d sought pleasure in the offense of my desire as any boy might. As terrible as the guilt could grow, as much as I might some nights wish to end everything, still, I indulged in it. I could not return these feelings to where they grew. They had a life of their own. And Heaven help me, I wanted them. A glimpse of a young man’s perfect neck. It’s always the small things.

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As I mentioned, 500 words. Checkpoint, if anyone didn’t guess, was the really difficult word to fit in, though there were a few others that probably managed to be awkward. Any guesses? Thoughts on the prompt and what it might have been?