Look Both Ways by Marco Holden Jeffery

They have that look of new love, innocent and fresh, yet so fragile. Everything they encounter in the world is a new delight to be experienced in tandem. They stroll slowly, hand firmly in hand, dawdling as they travel through the campus. Their only pressing matter is the other, and the precious time they have together; they are in no rush to waste it.

But perhaps the signs were there from the beginning; how could a world so cruel allow a love so pure to persist? They exit the campus, their pace still at a snail’s, lost in deep conversation, lost deep in one another. Why would their gaze drift anywhere else but the face and eyes of their love? The rest of the world holds no interest in them, not their own presence within it, not the BEWARE VEHICLES sign to their back, not the soft dip onto the road before them, not the accelerating Ford to their left, manned by a gentleman entirely focused on himself, his importance, the urgency of his problems and the world around him.

Love ends too quickly, the Ford screeches abruptly to a halt all too late, the smell of burning rubber fills the air. The boy extends his still-warm hand, and lets out a scream, but the world is numb and silent as the facade of new love falls away. Time barrels by quickly, the flashing lights and piercing sirens, the assuring voices doing little to soothe his pain. All of a sudden it’s much later, he’s not sure if it’s hours or days, and he finds himself at a towering stone structure, a green wooden door, the cold words emblazoned on the stone: CITY MORGUE. He strikes the door in desperation and disbelief, but it’s far too late.

I wrote this piece with the intention of conveying how all-consuming “love” can be and how it can be a distraction from other happenings in your life. Of course, I’m not just trying to say you should pay attention to your surroundings when with your significant other; it’s more a comment on making sure you’re on top of your life and not focus all your efforts on one relationship. I think the images that were put together for this story also beautifully conveyed how fleeting moments and relationships with other people can be; we’re introduced to these characters and the world they lived in so briefly, before it’s torn apart.

I feel like my piece captured this idea of how delicate human relationships can be. From the second paragraph, we start to feel the uncertainty of this world, and even from the first paragraph the immediacy of the couple, their need to be with each other conveys how precious moments are when they can be lost so quickly. I try to create a sort of sphere around the couple, through which the outside world filters as tiny pieces, sounds and sights leaking through the cracks, and I feel like this may haven’t been fully achieved but there are a few aspects that could be fleshed out or refined to convey this.

I feel like I struggled to capture the brevity within which a lot screenwriters and other storytellers manage to paint a strong world. In the screenplays we have looked at during this course, although admittedly written by incredibly talented and experienced screenwriters, manage to say so little in so few words. Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2009) manages to convey so much about a world and the characters within it with very little dialogue and very select descriptive language. I feel like my piece is somewhat overwritten, and relies on prose and flowery expressions too much to communicate its story world. Obviously when I write something resembling a screenplay for my final product, I won’t be able to use this style, but I must keep in mind the techniques the screenwriters we have examined use to capture tone, setting, character and history with such brevity.