I feel terrible, to be honest. I certainly did not write every day. At the beginning of the month I tried to, but by day 17 I had become too overwhelmed with real life. I say this like blog life is not real life, but it is a facet of it, since taking the time to sit down and write something is a real-life commitment.
I wrote in bursts. My skill has slowly diminished. Depreciated. I feel my age, even though people tell me not to and that I am ‘young’. Youth is in the heart though, the soul. My heart and soul feel like an ancient tree that has lived for thousands of years and seen the rise and fall of empires, and I recognise faces that have come and gone over the centuries, and I am just so very tired.
Which is silly because I am ‘young’ and ‘frivolous’ and ‘fanciful’ and still have copious amounts of hope.
Perhaps this world is running too fast. I have always felt it was running too fast for me, I have always felt like I was falling off the wagon. Even before kids and before my responsibilities began to feel elephantine.
But I did 30 posts this November, and while I do not congratulate myself at all, I do leave with resolve. Always. To do better. Someday. I am not going anywhere. But I must find for myself a yellow brick road.
These old roads lead to places that have changed as the seasons roll over the land.
Cold and frost coat everything in an ethereal beauty, which vanishes overnight once the thaw sets in, leaving behind rotten mulch and the filth of the world exposed.
But then spring follows soon after, hustling and blowing gales behind which she sprinkles the faintest dusting of light green. Buds, too small to be seen, begin to bloom on bare branches. And then there is an explosion. Seemingly overnight trees erupt with their pink and white tresses. Grass seems longer, greener, brighter. Skies appear bluer.
Yet these old roads remember those who have trekked over them, through the seasons, through the landscape change, as cities rose and fell around them. Bright futures crumbling to dust, and settlers changing the way things were, making things that are, that would be, that were to come.
When something is uncategorised, it is forgotten. She was uncategorised. She was the shelf upon which people put their unwanted things. At home it would be a glove that was missing its partner. A keyring one had collected from a fair. Some vague uncle’s snuffbox. A pair of spectacles left by someone, and nobody knew who they belonged to, so they stayed there, years on end, in the hopes that someone would recognise them and pick them up. She was that. Not the spectacles, the shelf. Well, perhaps the glasses too.
She was the bowl in which people placed their lost buttons, beads, clips, hatpins. Missing things. Miscellaneous things.
She collected stories and feelings, however. Memories of dark puddles of days, illuminated only by that one romantic lamppost. The one that you turn your head to stare at, as the carriage trundles by. The lone station with the arching cherry blossom tree, and she comes to life every spring, a princess, a pink queen draped in velvet finery. Forgotten all year round. Forgotten until one person comes to sit at the bench, and lays out their life story. They leave their sadness at her doorstep, and move on to brighter futures, greener fields, warmer houses. Yet there she stayed.
Waiting.
Waiting for trains, carriages, letters, hope, news, ships docking at the port, stories in the papers, visitors knocking at her door.
Frost coated every leaf in her tiny icicles, and the sunrise was vibrant, orange and gold, with feathery clouds dusting the sky, and a gentle mist hovering, meandering, draping itself over the lawns.
That was my morning.
And then the chaos whipped me into a fine cream of blurry thoughts and jumbled ideas and chasing chasing chasing the white wolf who flings himself from one snowdrift to another. So adept. So nimble. Blending seamlessly into the white background, till I am surrounded by tall white walls of nothing.
Nothing.
There is nothing in my brain, it rattles with nothing.
Or maybe it’s everything, spun around together as though in a washing machine drum, faster and faster until all you can see is the spinning drum… and not the enormous pile of clothes you shoved in there moments earlier.
Gale force winds tore at bare branches. Dead and withered leaves flew past, circled the ground, were wrenched here and there until they crumbled under the pressure of the storm or blew themselves into a rut from which they could not escape. Heavy clouds scudded speedily across the sky, grey and gloomy, bright here and dark there. Wild geese soared against the tempest in their hundreds under the clouds. It was a mighty sight for the sorest eyes.
It was under such blustery circumstances that she found herself being introduced to Thomas Norton, the doctor from South Bridge, a very distinguished young man.
‘Oh,’ he began eagerly, but she interrupted him, putting her hand out to him, saying curtly, ‘Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr Norton’.
His lips parted, such a slight movement, his voice cracked, eyebrows lifted.
‘But, L-‘ he began, and again she interrupted, ‘I did not know you were from South Bridge. My family lives there also. I have just taken the train from there this very morning. How long has it been since you left the dear place?’
Tom glanced quickly at their mutual acquaintance. Clearing his throat, he took her hand and smiled warmly. She saw him swallow, felt how hard his hand squeezed hers, and oh, the way his chin moved – all these mannerisms she recognised so very well from their childhood, adolescence, early adulthood together, all these mannerisms she knew with such familiarity, and which tore at her heartstrings. Still, she held firm under his discomfort.
‘Two years,’ came his reply. His voice cracked a little
‘Oh, that’s a while, Doctor.’
‘Indeed it is,’ he murmured.
‘Have you any plans to return?’ she inquired, knowing full well his answer.
‘Not at present,’ and his eyes smarted at her, ‘I have – I have other plans here at present.’
‘Yes!’ gasped Lady Locke, clapping her hands, ‘Why yes! Doctor Norton is to be married soon, Laura, to the wonderful Miss Rosalind Winters. You made her acquaintance yesterday, she came for tea with her cousins.’
‘Oh how lovely,’ said Laura, simply. She smiled, her fullest, brightest smile at him. Her eyes danced, her dimples flitted in and out of her cheeks, ‘congratulations, Doctor Norton, I wish you’ she paused, her eyes meeting his, wordless exchange running between them like a current of fire, ‘all the happiness in the world.’ The last came out as a breathless whisper.
‘Thank you, very much, Miss Smith,’ was his reply.
When the two ladies carried on their way, skirts tugged this way and that by the wind, shawls flapping behind them, he stood for a few moments as the world darkened around him. He looked at the sky. The birds soaring above, the wind was almost visible. It whipped around him, almost carrying him off with the strength of it.
On the 25th of November, 11 years ago, I started this blog. I am certainly a far different person now than I was then. I write less, for sure, and read less, and I suppose my skillset is greatly reduced.
I also can see a lot is changing in the blogging world. I can’t put my finger on what it is, because I am never around for long enough to find out.
A man waits at a lonely train station. He looks at his knees.
The tunnel gapes a giant black hole to his right. Empty, full of ghosts. The rat colonies coexist with the ghouls, perhaps because they cannot see them.
When the trains rush by, the air scatters these creatures, and they grumble, and you can hear them but for the screaming as the train shrieks past. Sometimes they peer in through the windows, and you think it’s a ghostly image from an old poster, but it really is Old Man Riley from 1923 who broke his leg fixing the power lines and never made it back out to fresh air.
The station is empty tonight. A light sizzles and crackles by the escape stairs. The ‘Way Out’ sign is flickering, and the man glances furtively at it. The digital time board above his head states in its calm and technical way that the next train is on time, due in 3 minutes. He hears the familiar rushing sound through the tunnel, and cranes his neck to see what he can see. A gust of forceful wind blows his tie and lifts his hair off his forehead, and he settles back on his bench, looks at his knees again.
Nothing comes out of the tunnel. Yet he carries on looking furtively at his knees, as though avoiding eye contact. Often he shifts, moves his feet backwards, leans sideways, glances up, terrified, before looking down again. Studiously. Intently. His knees telling him the time. His knees carrying the secrets of the world.
When the train does pull into the station, he heaves a sigh of relief. Gets up, and enters through the open carriage doors. Then the train pulls away, and his terrified face peers out of the window at the ghost throngs on the empty platform.
Does posting all my catch up posts in one day count as NanoPoblano? Is it lazy? I am at my mum’s house this week, and finally finding a moment to breathe. And that means a moment to sit down without a mountainous pile of stress and just write.
Aren’t parents a blessing, folks? My parents are. They give me everything I need, and I am so grateful for them.
One thing I noticed specifically about the man was the long scar on his arm. Like a rip, brown skin cut by a slice of white, an elongated mango, a long leaf, the edges blurry and dark, like someone had scribbled up and down all the way around this oblong shape with sharp, sharp ends.
He turned the steering wheel and pointed with this arm at something in the hazy brown distance. I did not take in what he had said, I only nodded, thinking about where he had got this injury from. My heart hurt a little, my father next to the man said something and they both laughed. Both men from the same womb, with almost the same features, my father seven years the man’s senior, but the man looking ten years older.
Wrinkled, aged, kind face. Thin body, the same frame as my father’s but the flesh melted from work, poverty, hardship. And so, so kind and generous. Always looking out for our well being and happiness while we visited.
I only met this man twice during my existence. Now he no longer walks upon this earth, leaving behind two young children and a heartbroken wife. I have spoken to him on the phone approximately 5 times. Yet he was my uncle.
I can blame it on distance, time, on the fact that my father was the one who spoke to his family and always passed on our regards. It was hard for him to visit his family often, although he would talk to them every other day. His mother, my grandmother, came to see us yearly.
I feel sad and guilty for not feeling sad enough, for not doing enough, for not being close enough.
What is strange is, his name means ‘immortal, eternal, everlasting’.
I think we are all ‘f****d up’ because the world is so fragile, and the human mind cannot deal with fragility. It fragments our existence and sends everything we ever knew tumbling away from us.
We lose control and are haunted by existentialism, and then check ourselves into therapy because we can’t make sense of it and somehow that is so deeply depressing.
We distract ourselves with loud music and funky interests, with books and words and lives that don’t exist. With colour and people and loud, buzzing laughter.
But when the lights go off we lie awake, fearful and fearing, because the darkness brings those thoughts to life again and there is noting we can do to stop them.
Where did we come from? We think. Where are we going? Everybody is going to die, so what is the meaning of life then? How is it that we are so intricate and full of depth and feeling and then suddenly one day we are stone cold and dead? WHAT WAS IT ALL FOR?
Sometimes the thoughts that spring upon us on those rude midnight awakenings have to do with our families. Or our other loved ones. Or our failed attempts.
I think the world is one big fat distraction. I deal with these thoughts with some kind of iron strength inside of me. When I lie awake, fearful, I think, Well, we are all born to die anyway. And dying doesn’t mean the end of everything. Dying is a part of living.
Also I believe there are reasons we live on earth, and it truly is not all for nothing.
Ocean Bream 