NY ♥ NY

I’m going out on a limb tonight and posting what could quite possibly be my first and last “literary” (and by literary, I mean “kind of creative”) post. With that said, a disclaimer: throughout my 3 years in college, I’ve developed a comfortable writing style/tone that waxes more academic than poetic. Which, of course, probably explains my hesitance to blog on a regular basis – I craft my words carefully because sounding casual doesn’t come as easily. (In fact, I reworded that sentence about 3 times. Writing takes me a long time, yes.) This inability to write casually might also be symptomatic of my high school years, which were filled with attempts at “poetry” (I cringe to admit this), emotional confessions of unrequited love (cringing, again), and not-so-subtle LiveJournal allusions to the fact that I REALLY WANTED A BOYFRIEND. Considering a certain one of my past “poetic attempts” showed up in an online archive of a certain poetry website last year (I naively submitted it years ago, but deleted it from the site when it resurfaced), I am still reeling from the embarrassment.

Okay, I’m done making excuses now. The following is a piece I wrote for my writing seminar, during my first semester at NYU (fall 2006, crazy.). The assignment asked us to choose a passage from Mrs. Dalloway and imitate Virginia Woolf’s writing style. Though I may not have my own creative writing skills, I definitely enjoyed imitating hers. After the jump!

How crowded! So many people! From what she remembered, it had always been this way; New York Penn Station would always and had always been crowded, with people from everywhere, going everywhere, all at once; passing, intersecting at this one point in their lives, never to meet or encounter each other ever again. What a concept, of strangers (but she should be accustomed to them, as a college girl living in the city as she was now), who, part of the daily flux of travelers, were nameless; passing momentarily everyday, exchanging a glance, or a half-smile perhaps, to others who appear nice enough, and not intimidating or uninviting in their ways. Except how different this afternoon was, for this time she was going home alone. How independent, how solitary, not in a disheartening way however, she felt in the train station; the atmosphere whirring as she and the countless, nameless others waited; standing, sitting, slouching; staring at the big black board that announced departures. The train she had intended to board had left but two minutes before she got to the station; what luck, for the subway had been delayed and made her late; feeling panicky as she usually did, snatching looks at the time to maintain her anxious state, she was unsettled and impatient (as she had been a few years before with her father), running through Penn Station, as their intended train – NJTransit, Northeast Corridor Line, Trenton last stop – flashed “Boarding” on the big black board, and threatened to disappear for good; she lost her glove while running, realizing later on the train that she only had one of the pair remaining. They had been coming back from a Broadway matinee show – was that it? – from another Chinatown excursion – maybe that was it? He would always take her into the city for one of those two reasons – her father. Those daytrips rarely happened anymore, although he would ask her occasionally what she was doing tomorrow, and if she wanted to go to the city instead; abandoning her social plans or her plans to do homework, which actually resulted in doing nothing, was out of the question these days; it was these outings with him that she remembered; the travel stress, his over-enthusiasm, the strangers, her sometimes lack of enthusiasm, even now when the big black board was flashing that her train was at gate 15W – though she was alone now – losing a glove while running through Penn Station.

If you’re still reading and curious, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway passage that I imitated:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”-was that it?-”I prefer men to cauliflowers”-was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace-Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was!-a few sayings like this about cabbages.