Day 1: The Nine of Swords

The Card

The Nine of Swords is pretty much the most hopeless card you can find in a tarot deck.  Whenever it comes up when I'm giving a reading, my heart sinks a little bit.

Here's a crappy picture of what hopelessness from a fairy tarot deck looks like:

You'll notice that this particular fairy happens to be wrapped up in a thorny vine in which she cannot escape.  Also, she is looking at a bird with hope on her face.  But the thing that's particularly gruesome about this picture is the fact that chick can see her escape plain as day but can't get to it.

But Gina, I hear you say, Doesn't the fact there's some sort of bird carrying a rose in its mouth indicate hope?  Don't birds symbolize hope and crap like that?

Well I don't know,
Picture the end of Titanic without getting angry.  Imagine if Rose couldn't unstick Leo's frozen hand from hers, side stroke over to that dead guardguy and rip the whistle from his lips and blew it, warning the lifeboat flashlight guy that she was, indeed, alive.  She would've watched that guy just float away, leaving her surrounded by frozen, floating corpses for the rest of her five-minute life, never riding a horse like a man or dropping invaluable artifacts in the middle of the ocean to be lost forever -
that's pretty much what that card indicates.

 

I'm sorry, should I have said "Spoiler Alert"?

Anywho,

It's basically the stuff of nightmares.  Or very specific type of nightmare.

 The Process

So anyway,

I basically starting riffing on the idea of having a nightmare and came upon the lovely feeling of not breathing.  

Of being trapped.  

Of being caught in traps and having your voice taken away from you.  

Feeling like you're drowning above water.  

So the play I jammed on basically became a nightmare within a nightmare within a nightmare kind of thing.  And when SHE (the stupid brilliant name I gave to my character) wakes up, she wakes up with her nightmare besides her.  

Here's an excerpt:

[Lights up on the inside of a train.  SHE tries to find a way off the train.  She can’t.  She’s trapped]

CRUSTWORTH

Allllll’board!

Tickets, tickets

You got yo’ticket there, ma’am?

SHE

NO!

No, I don’t

CRUSTWORTH

You know what that mean, don’t you?

SHE

I can leave

CRUSTWORTH

Complete wrong, there.

Mean you can’t get off.

Need a ticket to get off the train, not on.

Don’t got yo’ticket off, don’t got but no where to go.

SHE

NO!

CRUSTWORTH

Tickets

SHE

NO but I have to go

I have to get off

I have to

Have to

CRUSTWORTH

Breathe?

[CRUSTWORTH lights up another cigarette and blows it in her face]

In Conclusion:

Day 1 - DONE!  

I'm  no fool, I know that Days 1-5 are going to be like the best days ever because it's like YAY LOOK AT ME DOING AN AWESOME PROJECCCTTTTT I AM UNSTOPPABLE

and then it's going to be like

How many days are there in August again?

And then it's going to be like

This was a stupid idea

and then it's going to be like

NO I CAN DO IT

and then it's going to be like

....

Well I don't know, I'm only a psychic sometimes.