The Dramatist (p.2)
a short story
Laura was riding her scooter home after her morning workout. Suki Waterhouse was playing in her headphones. Laura was thinking about self-harm. Or rather, of course, not real self-harm—it was a storyline. Not for a short story, not for a film, not for a play, but simply a beautiful image, one that could easily be imbued with meaning and folded into memory.
In this imagined scene, Laura crashes into something on her scooter—epically, as if in slow motion—and then hangs suspended in the air, bathed in the dawn light of a noisy city. She then falls gently onto the asphalt. People gather around. She doesn’t understand anything, but she feels her consciousness softening, slipping away. Laura smiles.
The next sequence of her fantasy has Laura waking up to see Jonathan’s face bent over her.
“I’ve just realized something—your name is the same as that seagull’s!” she says, smiling softly, still not fully conscious.
“What? What the hell did you do?” Jonathan says.
“I wanted to feel something,” Laura replies, as if returning to some sad thought inside her head.
“Stop saying you don’t feel anything! Lately all you do is blame me for everything. You never laugh at my jokes anymore,” Jonathan says. Though in Laura’s mind, his speech isn’t especially coherent.
At this point, the beautiful image begins to glitch. They are suddenly in a hospital room, then still on the asphalt. Laura can’t get the glitch under control, so she switches to her own lines instead. Or rather, there is only one line left:
“This isn’t enough,” Laura from the imagined scene says, and the image resets: once again the dramatic fall in the dawn light, the gentle loss of consciousness, the noise of people around, Jonathan’s face—appearing strangely quickly.
The fantasy is interrupted every time by a traffic light. Laura can only imagine things like this while in motion. So each time she stops at a red light, she pauses the music and restarts it as soon as the light turns green. By the time she reaches home, she has replayed the same fantasy in her head three times.
The image leaves her sad. It feels as though life is relentlessly tragic, even in its beauty. Tears well up in Laura’s eyes.
The spell breaks when Laura steps into the apartment and turns off the music. It’s as if the movie has been switched off, leaving no aftertaste behind.
By the front door, she notices a package. Laura can no longer remember what she ordered. Thoughts of life’s tragedy are replaced by the anticipation of joy from her own purchase—one she no longer remembers.
Jonathan is sitting on the couch in the living room, drinking coffee.
“God, why do they wrap everything in so much plastic?” Laura complains, trying to dig her order out of the pile of packaging.
“How was the workout?” Jonathan asks.
“Brutal,” Laura replies, examining a jar of cream and trying to remember when she ordered it.
“I love you,” Jonathan says.
“Love you too! I’m taking a shower,” Laura says, blowing him an air kiss on her way to the bathroom.
“I’ll shower after you, leave me some hot water,” Jonathan calls after her.
“No, I’m taking music with me, so this will take a while,” Laura laughs in reply.
In the shower, she puts on Nicholas Britell and immediately winces. The music’s solemn, grand weight is no longer for her. She doesn’t want to imagine tragedy anymore. The scenes of self-harm evaporate, lodging in her throat as a shameful lump. She switches to Bill Withers and dances under the hot streams, smiling. Laura feels good. She wants coffee and bread with butter.
Who knows why our minds wander and we fantasize about catastrophes? Maybe it's a way to exorcize our fears and protect ourselves. I really enjoyed how you described that feeling, it’s so vivid