Can't Grow Up: Prologue
By Vlad-Ioan Hartopeanu
This is a passage from Character Bio 001 of my project 'Can't Grow Up'. It is the story of a young man navigating life and figuring himself out during a period of change. Every character/notable event in this fictional world based on reality has their own page/s of base information with supplementary information to 'flesh' them out. Here is the title explanation from the encyclopaedia of Can't Grow Up:
The naming system of character information is formatted accordingly: 001: represents the character in focus or regard. //: separates the character from the identification index.
101: the first number represents the form of content (1 = written; 2 = video; 3 =Musical). The last two numbers represent what number of that particular content style it is, for the specified character.
The following passage is a piece of creative fictional writing from my own Character Bio that sees our protagonist face an internal conflict.
It was due time that he focused on the matter at hand. He wet his throat with the comfortable burn of tea, as was the evening tradition. As the warmth spread through him, so too did his desire to create. He couldn’t help but to feel smug. A smile began teasing on the corner of his lips. “Seven hundred and fifty downloads,” Vlad said softly to himself with a whisper of pride in his voice. It was an achievement, there was no doubt. But for some reason the internal excitement seemed to dwindle with every new download.
Nonetheless, he had work to do. For the first time in his podcasting journey he was missing a weekly Wednesday post. Thick brows knitted together in annoyance. He had promised himself he would never miss one of these, no matter what. Instinctively, he began to steep the hot tea as thoughts of unintended judgement skipped in his head while he anxiously racked his brains. Maybe I could use it to my benefit, Vlad thought to himself.
It was starting to get late. The rhythmic drum of Paramore’s That’s What You Get steadily buzzed, quietly, somewhere across the room. As he sleepily sat in that house by the shore, it was decided that he would embrace the ‘art’ of the whole process and instead try to craft that in a presentable way. Well, it was all presentable as a matter of fact. That was the true and real beauty of it. The question bothering him was how was he going to capture the essence of that?
He paused, realising that his head was bobbing tirelessly to the mega hype-rap record, ‘Look At Me’ by the late (young) XXXtentacion. Closing his eyes for a fleeting moment of clarity, he listened as the waves crashed relentlessly outside. There was something calming about the ocean releasing its pressure on the shore. Breaking. Recollecting. At that moment, Vlad was present. He could feel his life for what it was then and there. A soul, simply by the seaside, and that’s all there was to it. It didn’t matter who he was, what he did, where he lived, or who he knew. All that mattered was the presence of the moment.
Every nano-moment that one lives is a blessing and opportunity that will never return.
Living in the present state is a glorious thing.
With those realisations it seemed as if the answers began unfolding in front of him like a child’s pop-up book. His path forward suddenly didn’t seem so uncertain as if it was shrouded in a veil of mist. The answer was the same. Ironic as it may be, there wasn’t an answer explicitly etched in stone.
With the tingling sensation of realisation, he understood that the path was the same. Continued in the same shoes. The pace was the same, too. Only one thing would change. That was the answer.
“A new perspective.” Vlad whispered quietly to himself.
Somewhere close by, the waves were crashing over and over and over.
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