Tag Archives: Gothic

A Gothic Symphony: Chapter One – Beginnings

It is a dark city on such a late summer evening. The sun is blood over the rooftops, and the girl in the park is sitting in the last rays passing between the old brick buildings.

It is a small park, of course; not much more than a few benches and a couple of old trees, but it is a refuge in a town that is huge, and busy. The trees haven’t begun to turn yet, and the grass and paths are golden in the spaces between their leaves. There are people, and they pass through, but they are few, and don’t spare the girl a glance.

The girl is sixteen; looks fourteen. The cigarette hangs in her hand, ash burned back almost to her fingertips. Black hood over her head and black jeans to her boots, she’s like a darker shadow in the shade of the trees. A lock of crimson hangs forward, and the small silver nose ring glints a little. Under the hoodie is a lace top, black also, and at her breast is a silver pendant: a silver crucifix entwined with snakes. A choker holds a black glass heart with a skull inside to her throat.

Her eyes — hazel, and green — are on the ground, and they wince as the ash burns to her fingers, but she doesn’t let go; only bites her black-stained lip. Not until the purse by her side vibrates does she drop the butt, conscientious enough to crush it. She reaches into the bag, past the driver’s license that says she’s sixteen and the ID that says she’s eighteen, to pull out the battered phone. The little screen says where r u.

She fiddles and sends a reply; stows the phone again. She raises her eyes — not her head — and looks: the trees, the pigeon, the passers-by. There is a moment, brief, when only the girl and the squirrels are in the park, and she gets up, the purse strap across her chest and her hands deep in the hoodie.

Her walk is slow, a little shuffling, her head always down. Her boots are good leather, well-worn, and tap gently against the pavement. They guide her along a path out of the park, though she steps to the grass to avoid the people who are once again passing through.

Where she leaves the park is a sidewalk that runs along the narrow street, cars parked tight in the gutter. She turns onto this; follows the iron fence to the corner. Her head is always down, and she steps onto the street to a screech and the blast of a horn.

Stopped in the middle of the street, a battered pickup continues to scream at her, also stopped in the middle of the street.

“The fuck, girl! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

And she looks up now, and stares at him; her breathing is quick and her eyes empty.

“Get the fuck out of the way!” […]

Read the full chapter here.

Thought of the Week: My Own Gothic Symphony

Disclosure time: as a teenager, I walked through the halls of a deep, dark abysmal depression. Truth be told, I still do, although it’s changed and mutated to a point where I no longer do silly things like try to kill myself.

Of course, you already knew that.

You also know that I’m resuming work on my secondary novel (primary, in a sense – I began it over ten years ago), A Gothic Symphony. You can read the first few chapters already at agothicsymphony.wordpress.com. It’s a story of tragedy, depression and despair, and it’s a story that is deeply personal to me. You see, in many ways it’s my story.

All right, it’s about a girl and things happen to her that never happened to me…but they did happen to people I knew. Pretty terrible things, too. We can laugh at them now – did you really think you’d die from a bottle of baby tylenol? – but when you’re a teenager and the world has closed around you in darkness, it’s all terribly, terribly serious. This story is a way for me to keep in touch with the “me” that was, because that time of my life was, despite the torture and agony of living in blackness the whole time, extremely meaningful. It was when I found myself and my identity.

In fact, I was talking with the Lovely J only the other day about this, and how my depression became my identity. How it felt like being depressed was the only thing I was good at. This was silly, of course, because I was good at lots of stuff, but I was especially good at beating myself up about it, both figuratively and literally. This is something I still do to this day, in fact, though the physical beating myself up doesn’t happen much anymore.

You see, depression for me wasn’t a disease to be cured; it was a home to be found, a thing to aspire to. People who weren’t depressed were cattle. Or sheep. Some ungulate or another. Depression was my savior, and I walked the fine line between the comfort of misery and the lure of death. Many times my agony felt too much to bear, but more often it was the gut-wrenching pain of existence that, ironically, kept me going.

That really doesn’t make much sense, does it? Probably why I’m still going to therapy all these years later.

Music, also, was a huge part of my life. Depressing, miserable music. Music with delightful lyrics like:

“I’ll kill myself: I’ll blow my brains onto the wall!

See you in Hell, I will not take this anymore!

Now, this is where it ends, this is where I will draw the line

So scuze me while I end my life.”

Excuse Me While I Kill Myself – Sentenced, The Cold White Light (2002)

Ah, those were fun times. I still listen to Sentenced, by the way. Another one of those comforts of old times. Bands like Sentenced, My Dying Bride, Anathema, Marilyn Manson, HIM and Abyssic Hate (I’ve written about many of these previously) filled my dark world. They, too, kept me going.

Take that, everyone who says suicidal lyrics promote suicide.

All of this – the darkness, the nighttime living, the candles, the music, the hopelessness and despair – this was my gothic symphony. I wore black all day, I’d go out with black eyeliner and lipstick (bet you want to see those photos, eh?), I obsessed over spiders and vampires and anything that felt like it came from the bleakness of 1890s victorian England.

I self-harmed. A lot.

And all of these things are Amy’s gothic symphony, as well. I feel sorry for her, I really do; all of my misery, and anguish and pain are being channeled into her, and her only outlet is being read about by all of you. I had other avenues; other things that happened to me that, sadly, will not happen to Amy.

The thing is, what I lived through, and continue to live through; what Amy is going through as the pages of A Gothic Symphony unfold; none of this is unique. People live and die every day with the same torturous agony that I lived with, and at times still do. So while A Gothic Symphony is cathartic for me, it’s also a letter to everyone who’s ever felt the black claws of despair: there are people out there who know how you feel.

I know how you feel.

Featured image from http://dailywicca.com/2011/10/08/ceromancy-the-fine-art-of-candle-reading/.

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A Gothic Symphony: Diving Once More Into the Darkness

It’s been almost a year since I last worked on A Gothic Symphony, and I regret that very much. The problem is that with The Redemption of Erâth growing ever closer to publication and Book Two well underway, it’s hard for me to set aside the time to work on A Gothic Symphony.

It’s also hard because it requires a very different state of mind. Although The Redemption of Erâth is indeed a dismal fantasy, rife with darkness and despair, there is also a sense of escapism therein. It’s fantasy.

A Gothic Symphony is anything but fantasy. It’s a trawl through the mud, a raking over the coals of depression and self-loathing, and it puts me in a frightening place. A place I haven’t been in for over ten years. But it’s a place I have to go to, to get this book out. And there’s nothing more important to me than to see this story – my story – bear fruition.

So I will be working on it for the coming weeks, attempting to plow through and get as much of it done as possible. I can’t commit to a chapter each week, because some will be harder for me to write than others, but I will post chapters as they come (weekly if possible) so that you can enjoy them in unedited form.

Thanks for your patience, and I hope you can enjoy A Gothic Symphony.