Life, Reimagined

"She's worse than you."
I had to pause in order to push the feeling of wanting to slap him - all the while acknowledging that I'm more of a punching kind of a girl - deep down and twist it in my brain to be reborn as something new. That rebirth was realized later as I waited for my train to arrive. Suddenly, I wondered what non-writers do with awkward, embarrassing and downright painful moments.
As a writer I pause for a nanosecond and file it away to use later. This would be labeled something that a character would say if they were:
a) an insensitive jerk
b) unable to tell what's appropriate
c) someone with a horrible sense of humor
d) in the case of the speaker - all of the above
Before he can go on with a laugh and say, "It's a joke, it's a joke." I have already gotten over it. No need to explain that jokes shouldn't need to be labeled in order to be identified, it's all soil for a story to grow.
In every life there are moments when you think it will be impossible to take another breath, when you pretend there was something on the sidewalk that made you trip, when you must bite your tongue until you taste blood. Worse than the original moments are when they make their encore, appearing in your mind when you're already feeling run down as if giving you that last kick to get back under the covers. But as a writer those encores spark insight, and I'll admit a certain kind of retooling of the event once it makes it on to paper. Everything becomes much easier to smile at. The jerk's own humiliation is played out during an internationally televised event. The girl that trips over her own feet falls into the arms of her soon-to-be boyfriend. That first breath without pain becomes the start of a journey...
Without that transformation, how does one deal with all the ghosts of their past? Every scar both physical and mental has opened my mind to what seem like endless possibilities. Those possibilities are as much a part of the experience as the event that caused them.
As I waited for the train, the insipid careless remark that would otherwise haunt someone else had yielded a blog. I will have to thank him. Or maybe just not be so mean when the cameras are rolling in my next story.