This weekend my boss went to Laser Quest with his ten year old son. That’s a weird way to start a blog post about romance, but there it is.
(Fun fact–my first romance novel was inspired by something my boss said.)
The romance doesn’t come from my boss, or his son, or even Laser Quest, really. But those things spurred my thinking.
I’ve played laser tag exactly once in my life. It was a snowy, winter evening in Colorado, and I was a teenager. A lovelorn teenager, as was typical for me in that time of my life. I don’t remember the game very much. It’s all a blur of shadows and neon, pretzels and Pepsi.
What I do remember is the ride home.
I sat in the back seat. The object of my (at the time) eternal love and devotion sat in the seat directly in front of me. I could see the way his neck sloped into the collar of his jacket, the fringe of blonde hair, his freckles. All of this, so close, just six inches of foam and a million miles away.
Right before I started high school my parents moved to the middle of nowhere. This meant that any kind of activity that involved driving into ‘the city’ inevitably entailed a long car ride, half an hour at least. Throw in snow, and a bunch of teenagers happy to be away from home, and the drive can easily streeeeeetch out.
At some point during this drive, and don’t ask me how because for the life of me I cannot remember, my hand wound up on his shoulder, and his hand wound up on mine.
That’s it, folks.
But for a girl full of butterflies and self-doubt like myself, that touch was a revelation. I survived on the memory of that touch for months, because after that, affection was not very forthcoming from that particular arena. It was the MO of our interactions, from where I stood. A dance that I won’t describe here, and now.
So there I was, this morning, eleven years after the fact, folding hospital gowns, thinking about how cute it was that my boss played laser tag (and schooled the younger kids, apparently) and wham, this memory hits and for a moment I am breathless. I pause. I look around, and consciously reorient myself. Because the emotions attached to that memory were life and death, end of the world stuff.
And isn’t that what being a teenager is about?
I’m revising my YA fantasy novel right now. As I recently told a friend I need more Bad Guy, more Self-Sabotage, and more Romance.
I need more of what I felt, remembering that long winter drive. I need the truth of it, injected into my character’s relationships. And maybe, I’ll let Sydney get what she wants.
At least, for a little while.
Our work needs these intense emotional experiences. Have you been working on anything lately that forces you to face these deeper, possibly buried, emotions?
Photo used under creative commons license from kreg.steppe
