Michael J. Seidlinger’s The Fun We’ve Had (Lazy Fascist Press) is a beautiful long poem (although not officially), or a game of Pong on two lovers’ emotions. Seidlinger has trimmed down all the less essential to tunnel-vision on all the uncertainties that adorn/plague a romance, whether cherished or doomed.
He’s put the two protagonists, him and her, in a coffin, adrift in an endless ocean. They each take turns turning to the reader as a crying shoulder. The journey from denial, anger, bargaining, and fear into acceptance is a familiar story that many of us mostly try to sweep under the rug. We all have rushed into it, more or less. The love capsule we take is Pandora’s box we willingly swallow. This amalgam of pain, sorrow, and broken hearts muddled with the mundane and the healing dust of time is a boat ride, a workbook, and a collection of aphorisms from both ends of a relationship.
If you are on Twitter and into creative writing tips, not many adventurers out there tweet about writing itself than the man with the handle mjseidlinger. Some jokingly, and some live from the fatigue of writer’s block. Here’s a favorite:
“Yay typos. It should read ‘diverse oeuvre.’”
So now you can see why they couldn’t be for long.
They had wanted to be individuals, much like we all seek the highest waves in hopes of surfing them to a distant shoreline, one that doesn’t exist until found. We seek the peaks in hopes of pleasing the fact that we thought we were, for a time, an individual among individuals. Though we may, though we might, the waves are purely that — temporary and fleeting, no matter how high. The current continues, changing all that doesn’t appear to change, the valuable becoming meaningless, the meaningless becoming valuable; the tides make daily proclamations.
The life of the ocean continues its cycle, on schedule for both new-and-old to balance out to become nameless.
The waves are hellos.
The storms are goodbyes.
The stories that stick around are our sincerest apologies.
