Welcome to the dark, beautiful place where my stories are born...

I never cease to be amazed at what sparks my imagination, and ignites my inner fiction.  I was driving home late last night or early this morning, and was listening to the Counting Crows album, Recovering the Satellites.

A tune came on that I hadn’t heard for a long time. As I hummed along whilst trying to fight some severe fatigue, the following line actually awoke me and got me thinking. The song is called “A long December.” The lyric is below:

“All at once you look across a crowded room

To see the way that light attaches to a girl.”

All of a sudden, like a sleeping guard dog, my imagination woke up and said “Hurry up and get home Andrew you have to write.”

As I drove home I started thinking about how things in life can always change and how situations can make you see someone in a different light. As I thought more about it a scene (like I was watching a movie in my mind) came to me.

I got home at 2.13 am and what I wrote is below. It’s raw and rough. I don’t know where this will fit, or what this will be. Maybe it’s only meant to exist here and now on ‘andrew speaks easy’ but here is the passage.

Even if these words never find a home, the process was exhilarating.

Written by Andrew Natale

Copyright-December 2010.

     It wasn’t until he made a fist to knock that he realized the torrent of sweat evident on his palms, so he quickly wiped them on his pants in a desperate attempt to hide his nervousness. He could hear her footsteps to the door; she was wearing heels he thought.

      She greeted him with a devastating smile. She wore a black tight fitting strapless dress, her hair purposefully clumped on one side. The warm yellow glow from her living room attached itself to her naked right shoulder revealing the intricate path of her collar bone that lead its way to her delicate neck line.

       To the casual observer it was obvious that she was attractive, but to him she possessed an invisible beauty one only discovered through years of innocuous conversations and spontaneous laughter. Others noticed the sum of her beauty; the fall of her hair, the charm of her conversation and the grace of her laughter, but all of them submitted to their own impatience to want to get to know her immediately, instead of savoring the slow discovery. 

“A Long December”

Words and Music by Adam Duritz from the album Recovering the Satellites. See the flim clip below, listen for the above lyric (1:24) and notice a young Courtney Cox in the clip.

Thanks Adam.

A.