Please please please update Stargazer, I read all of it today and it's pure gold. I love your writing style, the story is quite sad but has an underlying humor that made me laugh out loud while wanting to cry. The dialogues are so great and I love how you portray Ed in your own way while also keeping him in character. You've done a fantastic job, and I can't wait to know how you wrap it up. I'm in love with your writing holy heck.
Hello and thank you! I finished writing Stargazer so long ago that it feels weirdly distant now, so it’s cool to check in after so long and find messages about it. I’ll make a post one day about where the whole story can be found, but for now, here’s a random little section that I never put on tumblr. Enjoy!
***
Every time you see Iris, you look away.
No, that’s not right.
It’s more like you don’t see Iris at all. She’s there; you know she’s there, drifting through the hallways of your house, her voice a soft murmur to her mother in another room, the scent of her lotion lingering for half a second when she passes you in the kitchen. You’ve eaten dinner with her, sat on opposite sides of the same couch watching telly, swum in the same pool. She’s this constant, inescapable presence in your life, but somehow you manage not to look directly at her, not ever, not even while handing her the bowl of mashed potato at dinner. You couldn’t say how she’s wearing her hair on any given day, whether or not she’s even changed clothes at all in the past week. You’re aware of her like an ache, like her body is this painful feeling you have when she’s in the room, an uncomfortable tightness in your jaw and the inability to turn your head in her direction.
And for her part, Iris doesn’t see you either. She appears in the same room only when she has to, coming and going as unobtrusively as a breeze, her footsteps sometimes fading like mirror fog before you even feel her come through. She only speaks in front of other people, and she never sounds as though anything has changed, but she also never addresses you directly. No one else notices. Not even Hannah notices. Did Iris never speak to you before? It feels like she did all the time. How could no one notice the difference? How could they not realize you and Iris are just ghosts now, haunting each other?
Rumors on the Internet. No surprise there. You and the woman from Big Brother, and on some blogs, you and the woman from Big Brother’s friend that you barely recognize from your night out (but apparently danced scandalously close to). She’s some sort of online model. Fans arguing about whether or not you left with those two while your girlfriend suffered at home. Many people assume you did, and this is all the proof anyone needs, isn’t it? Right here on several different social media stories helpfully compiled by the tabloids.
Miraculously, no one seems to have filmed you and Iris kissing, or you being sick on the floor afterward. Maybe the Big Brother woman and her friends saw you but decided that bit of the night didn’t fit well into their narrative.
Hannah looks through all the photos and clips, laughs at your drunken dance moves. She’d woken up when you came trudging in that night and sank heavily onto the bed. To her, you were just drunk and tired. She had no way of knowing that every part of you that wasn’t your body was fractured, hollow. She just knew you came home to her that night the same way you had every night before, and when you lay down beside her, she reached over and squeezed your hand in the dark.
“Hey, you’re in this one,” she says to her sister brightly. She turns her tablet to show the photo: you with your hands in the air, sweaty hair stuck to your temples, one knee up like the crane pose from Karate Kid while the Big Brother woman laughs delightedly. And in the background, small, a little blurry, Iris sitting alone with her drink, fingers playing idly with the bar straw in it, watching you dance.
Iris leans over to look at the photo. You feel her there, so near you that her hair swings down into your field of vision, but you don’t look at her. As long as you don’t look, she could be anyone. But you’re staring hard at the image of her, at the way she was looking at you that night, at the shape of her mouth, her eyes. It’s been days since you’ve seen her face. From the front, she looks less like Hannah than you remember. What was she thinking about while she watched you? “Guess I’m famous now,” she says wryly. “How will I ever go out in public again?”
At the same time, you and Hannah both say, “Balaclava.”
Then, shaking her head slowly, Hannah says to her sister, “I can’t believe you met Geri Halliwell.”
***
