Ernest

Avatar Author: Ana Cristina Writer, teacher, & hopeless romantic with a penchant for falling for fictional characters. Read Bio

Your moods were like mercury –
A flash of silver in the hand
Your words beating against fragile ears
Like a door slamming shut –
Closing out everyone, even your wife.
You always claimed to hate your mother –
Was this the cause of your malaise, the reason for your rage?
Or maybe it was the war –
Perhaps driving all those ambulances
Full of dismembered and bloodied limbs
Shook something loose in you, never to be found again.
You retired to faraway climes like Cuba
But no matter where you traveled, or where you took your moveable feast,
You could not escape yourself.
Next you tried electroconvulsive therapy, tried to shock yourself sane,
Only instead of finding solace, you found yourself losing your memories,
The years slipping through clutching fingers like forgotten grains of sand.
But the one thing you never lost was your genius –
The control you strove to regain in life was evident in your sparse prose,
Your military-precise punctuation –
The words appearing pure upon the page as if burned into existence.

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Comments (7 so far!)

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  1. Avatar ElshaHawk (LoA)

    Things I did not know about Hemingway. Because I don’t even remember ever studying him. But I don’t remember much of what I did study in my English classes because they all ran together.

  2. Avatar ElshaHawk (LoA)

    And I’m going to begin another sentence with a conjunction.
    Because I can.

  3. Avatar Ana Cristina

    Really?! I read him in high school and college. You should check him out!

  4. Avatar Ana Cristina

    But you can’t begin sentences with conjunctions! Because it’s simply not allowed!

    ;)

  5. Avatar ElshaHawk (LoA)

    Indeed.

  6. Ahfl_icon THX 0477

    I thought that was an ode to Hemingway, once I realized you weren’t coincidentally married to an abusive war vet who moved to Cuba. I mean coincidences happen, but that’d be a bit much. Can definitely feel the sympathy coming through in this piece.

  7. Avatar zxvasdf

    You should check out the longest running graphic novel Cerebus. Dave Sims had a period where he was obsessed with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and he built up this whole pseudo-fictional history of Hemingway and his wife in one of the latter volumes.

    The coolest thing about Cerebus is not just the general weirdness, the awesome art, the intelligence, but it’s also how you can track Dave Sims’ belief system throughout the years.

    The final few volumes is actually a deep dissertation on religion, and there’s a hilarious (I think Dave was seriously explaining his perspective through Cerebus) but well done interpretation of the Creation in terms of the male and female sides of God. But I digress. Great ficly there.

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