Posted on by authorialintentions

Today I made coffee

 

 

Blah blah blah coffee blah blah blah single bean…

I don’t actually mean ‘blah’. I do care. In fact, I care too much. I care about the beans, and the day dots, and whether or not the bloody thermometers are calibrated properly. But, really? All these tiny things that are slowly slurping the life out of me. I forget why I wanted to be there in the first place. I forget the personal mission, and instead of feeding off of it as I intended, I allow it to feed on me. Forget espresso extractions, we’re talking soul extractions here. And that’s not what I came for…

So here’s the deal..

I love the store. I don’t love the smelly ex-heroin addicts that sometimes dribble and slur incoherently at me, or the coughing woman that smells like death that I want to tell to leave and never come back because I can’t stand the sight or thought of their sad, capped, painful and miserably addicted existence.

I don’t love the smarmy types that genuinely think they are presenting their obviously stupid barista with the most complex of challenges when they order the quirkiest drink combination they can possibly muster. I kid you not, they chuckle to themselves as they give their order and roll their eyes at their friends as if to say…

‘I know, I’m so complicated and wonderful, and such an exquisitely complex and therefore, interesting person. I’m so difficult but you know what? Being difficult is my perogative, and I’m sure as hell going to embrace that right!’

I don’t love that in these instances I repeat the order back as though they had just simply asked for tea for one. My obvious (and purposeful) refusal to be blown away by their complicated order irritates them. They look genuinely disgruntled that I have not reaffirmed their personal complexity.

‘Haha, I’m sorry, I’m so difficult!’

Lady, you have no idea. Your drink is not difficult. It’s easy. It may have taken you near on a millenia to get it out while you are holding up a queue with your self-congratulatory giggles to your friend and speaking so slowly to me, as if I am either a) a child or b) stupid, however, what is difficult, is the reality of how painfully transparent you are.

I don’t love counting ketchup sachets. In fact, counting anything gives me the hump. I hate that whilst counting ketchup sachets, the barely audible counting becomes increasingly aggressive as I contemplate my first class degree.

Or removing a sanitary towel from the sink in the bathroom. I could get on of my staff to remove this – but that’s never going to happen, I won’t ask. I won’t ask them to do something so demeaning.. They will then think as I do. I want them empowered, not saturated to the point of drowning, by the roles they take under my watch. I want them happy and productive in their work, not thinking…

Fuck. This.
I’m better than this.
I’m wasted here.

Like I do.

But, in rare moments of clarity, I remember. I remember why I’m there.

When the extracting of my soul, self-worth, energy, and patience ceases for long enough, I remember that this is a place full of people and full of stories. It is a place where people make plans, where decisions are made, where relationships are forged and severed, where realisations are met, and progress is made over cups and glasses of self – professed simplicity or complexity.

I remember that I wanted to be amongst this. That I wanted to observe and absorb the stories of everyday people. I wanted to eaves – drop on the snippets of life that reverberate around the room amid the grinding and blending. I wanted to learn who? Why? What for? How did they come to this? Where are they going? I wanted habits and reality.

I wanted people.
I wanted stories.

Posted on by authorialintentions

Before, behind, beyond, and blind

 

I often wonder what it would be like to return to the house that had contained us all for those sordid and slowly passing years. I wonder what my mind would do if I came to directly face what had once been my prison. Often, when I think of it, I consider the conifer trees. In truth, those trees, are the first thing that springs to my mind; accompanied by an initial image of the exterior of the house from a certain angle. Always initially the same angle. But its always those trees.

Perhaps they hold such significance because they grew as I did, alongside me, on the outside. I remember them at a few different stages, but the variations are spread over time that cannot be accurately gauged or entirely trusted. Tiny saplings standing to attention like weak inexperienced infantry; on basic training, deployed to their fated service; committed but not yet sure of what they have been strategically deployed to defend, not yet knowing their purpose and ignorant to the politics that bubble away underneath the surface of their service.

They were so scrawny. so short and feeble; innocent and fresh. Perfectly aligned along the perimeter, the majority of them in 2 rows, one shorter than the other, linked by those that arced around the curve of green to make more pronounced the shape of the hellish corner plot on which the semi-detached stood. I wonder how strong they are now, and whether they know their purpose. I wonder how tall they stand and whether the man of the house enjoys neatening them, takes pride in the neatness of their formation, whether he considers them as a line of defence for his family or whether he allows them to become wayward until his wife’s nagging becomes too incessant to bear and so he spends the best part of a day snipping and chopping in the sunlight while contemplating the miseries of his life. I wonder if  their purpose has changed from what it once was; whether they now serve to keep the outside world out, or to keep the secrets inside the brick hidden. I wonder if they have been murdered, if they no longer served a purpose, and so, were wrenched from life to know only death and dryness.

I remember how odd they appeared when they were first planted against the backdrop of a well-established and giant patriarchal conifer that took pride of place in the middle of the front garden, shielding the lounge window from the outside world of the cul-de-sac. It stood like a promise, a foreshadowing of their fate: that once bound to the earth there is a sense of the inescapable, some doomed inevitability that the weak will become strong, one way or another, and that any growth is bound by servitude from the conditions chosen for us by others.

I often tell myself that I will return to the house, that I will face it head on as though it were a living, breathing enemy. My reasonable mind sometimes kicks in: it isn’t the house, or the conifers. They aren’t to blame. They cannot be. Yet among the confusion of symbols, and layers of possible meaning that makes all of this exactly what it is, those trees, and that house, are all there is left. There is no paper. There is no man, or woman. Just me, and that house, whose walls formed my prison, doubly guarded by those trees, know the whole truth. Only myself and them remain. We are the residue. The remnants of the aftermath. Those that continue to serve and keep secrets.

A few months ago, whist sitting in a coffee shop, I sprang to my feet, closed my laptop, and set off to see the trees.

The drive was excruciating. I did not know if they would greet me. I did not know if they still lived. I hoped, despite all that they represent, that they would still be there. I wanted them to hide the house from me. I realised, as I drove through winding country roads, that I was relying on them to protect me from the house. They once served a purpose to keep passing eyes from looking past the plot’s perimeter and into the secret space dominated by the depravity beyond the glass of the wide bay window. Now, I hoped that the purpose they once served for another’s desires would serve to protect me. I turned the corner into the cul-de-sac to find myself sufficiently greeted, but unprotected.

Posted on by authorialintentions

Mum’s the word

The A4 pad that had been floating around the house for a few years now had remained hidden and out of sight for the majority of its redundant life.

It is not just any pad.

It is a pad, sealed along one landscape length with two black magnetic strips on the back. It was a planner pad that must have seemed like a good idea at the time but had soon proved itself useless as the weight of it pulled the top down, bending the card above the top magnet so that the stupid thing would slide down and fall from the fridge, making anyone within earshot jump.

So it got demoted; put in a drawer and disregarded, that is until this most recent move where it has reappeared.

It’s a good idea. An organisational tool for family life, and unlike a calendar, it was not restricted by date but simply boasted the openness of a Monday to Friday grid; the titles of the day along the top, and a column to the left side that states ‘NAME’. The grid is blank save for the word ‘MUM’ filling the first section of the name column, and a title for the overall sheet that tells the owning organiser that the week they are looking at is ‘THIS WEEK’.

The cursed thing, since its resurrection, had been given a second chance. The intentions to use it were honourable at some point I’m sure. God knows, my life has always needed organisation and so, it lived peacefully on the fridge in the new house for a week, before flapping to the floor and making her jump. I remembered why it was disregarded in the first place, swore at it, and placed it on top of the fridge, under the confiscated light-sabre and the small rectangular plastic serving tray covered in sickly cupcakemail design.

And so the pad lays face down and is sometimes used, not for the purpose for which it was designed but instead the reverse of each sheet is sometimes used, admittedly, mainly for list-making – the best, and most traditional of organisational tools. Sheets have also been used to leave notes for her daughter, or to take down telephone numbers.

Quite late I had returned from my sister’s, put the boy to bed, and had a bath. Feeling inspired by the reading material that kept me company, I decided to jot down the quote that had played on my mind before making the ritualistic coffee, lighting a candle and setting down to write. As I took down the pad, turned it over and moved to separate a page to tear it free from the others, it dawned on me that the pad, in the briefest second of glancing over it, made me feel like a terrible mother.

I looked down at it in disgust; is not an organisational tool at all, but rather a guilt trip on paper that asks too many questions at once with the badly drawn images that are dotted throughout the grid. Flowers, because women, and especially mothers, like flowers, right? Tea cups and a kettle, because women, and especially mothers, drink lots of tea and coffee, right? An image of a baby’s vest. A clock. Two stacked saucepans. A couple of handbags. A school bag. A plate, set with a knife, fork and spoon. A plant pot with a healthy green plant inside, because women are automatically able to sustain all life, right? Some stripy bees that look as though the ‘artist’ couldn’t quite decide if he intended butterflies instead. A baby’s food bowl. And three images of women with children: One holding the hand of her animated offspring, bags in hand; presumably on the school run, or perhaps shopping. Another with her child on her lap reading a no doubt riveting work entitled ‘My First Reading Book’, and finally, a child, rattle in hand being pushed in a triangular pushchair by a mother who looks psychotically happy. Surely she cannot be that OK with the obvious hair-dye disaster she has recently suffered.

Considering the quote that I was about to place on its reverse, the contradiction was too strong to ignore. I wonder why the hell I own such a ridiculous thing and I try to remember if I bought it many years ago, in a fit of madness, or whether it was a gift, given by someone hoping it would help me to be more organised, and let’s face it, ultimately a better mother.

The quote, in case you were wondering, reads as follows:

…choice is often an illusion. People are firm believers in free will. But they choose their politics, their dress, their manners, and their very identity, from a menu they had no hand in writing. They are constrained by forces they do not understand and are not even conscious of. But even the illusion of choice is of enormous social significance.

From a menu they had no hand in writing… interesting.

I realise immediately that this so-called organisational tool is just a sub-section of the larger menu. On each sheet we are reminded by the images, presented in their light-hearted, child-like, and animated fashion, or what things we must do in order to be a mother, to be a good mother, and to deserve our name ‘mum’ as given by the tool. we aren’t even permitted to include our own name in the space; we are named by the menu.

Gender role assignation is rife in this tool, that is plain to see, but the irony of it as a platform in which to set hat quote down was too much. I wondered if I had always thought this way, and realised that I hadn’t. I decided I have Univarsity to thank for my changed view of the world, and so cynical as his thinking may be, I am grateful for it.
Ithe is certainly an irritation to be told what a mother should be.

For example, yes, I admit… I do drink an awful lot of coffee – but not because I’m a mother or because I am a female. Instead, I drink a lot of coffee because I love it; because I’ve got an addiction, that comes from being a batista and student, and needing to stay awake for ridiculous amounts of time. I also love gin – there’s no gin image with ice and a slice.

I wonder if there is another pad that just says ‘dad’…. I wonder if it would be mostly blue, if it would include images of tools, a football, a pint of beer, perhaps a racing car. Or perhaps, the identity stripped ‘dad’, just like the nameless ‘mum’, would be presumed to be a single father? and as such would there be images of a psychotically dad pushing a buggy? Would a teapot be assigned to ‘dad’? I strongly suspect not.

You get my point, right?

Damn that menu that infiltrates our lives, consciences, and stationary. Damn it for telling us how exciting should be, what we hold like, and how our identity should be constructed in order to comply with gender roles.

I’m just going to leave this here and step away from the post, the page, and the embedded stereotyping within our society. Sometimes such seemingly insignificant ‘tools’ are the most effective. But to whom do these tools actually belong? Who organises who here?

Posted on by authorialintentions

Death’s Kiss

I hide in the shadows.

Watching.

Waiting.

I, in my ethereal form, am crouched and cramped; peeking over the floral duvet that bedraggles the bed. The house is empty. Her room: both her prison and hiding place, is the room she has chosen to die in; shrouded in an inky blackness – a comforting darkness – just as she likes it. The wall opposite the bed supports the defeated frame of the girl who, during these long hours, has shed a torrent of tears.

She does not know I see her folded there with the pink jingly-jangly elephant, faded and aged, sandwiched between her chest and thighs. She does not know that I hear the breath bursting in fits from her body as she sobs or that I know that she has remained in the same position for 6 hours. She thinks no one sees or hears her but I do. I see her pale drawn face and her blonde dishevelled hair revealing white knuckles that belong to hands that clench it in fistfuls.  Her mother and stepfather cannot see her. They currently dine on shellfish at a reputable restaurant, talking idly of their fraudulent lives but secretly wishing they were elsewhere. While many miles away, her brother sips a pint of ignorant bliss in the company of friends, far from the hell he calls home.

I want to grab her but I cannot. There are rules.
And those who break the rules pay the consequences. I have learned that lesson.

So I, uncontrollably mimicking her, am folded as she is and all I can do now is watch and wait. My watching provides no detachment. Watching means to live and breathe; though I have no life or breath inside of me. I am integrated into the secret agonies of the final moments of my charge; witnessing every erratic thought that spins through her haunted mind. I feel what she feels while, unknowingly, she manipulates my invisible form to mirror her actions.
It is she who has summoned me.

The flashbacks come.
I see the time she watches her mother leaving the driveway. At the window she stands, praying her mother will change her mind. Her muscles tense. Her throat tightens. Her eyes tingle with the sting of raw tears. She is clutching something fluffy and pink that I recognise: the thing that always absorbs her teardrops. She wants to bang on the window and scream for help. She hears footsteps and turns to seek out the source.
The man is there.

Perhaps I should steal her? I want to spare her from this painful review.
Oh, but I must wait!

A new memory comes. I see her sitting alone at a dining table. She hums along to a song that plays only in her head. She is told to shut up. She does as she is told and finishes her homework in silence.
She packs her books away and rises from the table, pushing her chair underneath. Wooden legs screech on ceramic tiles. The base of the milk bottle slams into the back of her head. Down she goes.
Darkness overpowers her vision
The man sips his tea.

She takes me to the summer she turned 7. She has been out riding her bike. She comes home to discover her mother is working an evening shift at the local pub, keeping her blind eye busy. The daddy long-legs are dancing clumsily yet menacingly across the garden path. She makes a run for it, through their lax formation, to the door. She enters; quiet as a mouse but I, and I alone, hear her prayers for invisibility.
The man waits.

Patience, I tell myself. Patience.

I see her asleep. Cosy in her bed. Skinny arms form a tight cage around her favourite thing: the pink jingly-jangly eared elephant she has had since she was 2 weeks old. His stitched-on, big, bright blue eye is eternally open, currently just centimetres from her face; looking at everything. Seeing nothing. The radio plays low. The room is covered wall to ceiling in posters of posing pop stars. So many faces. So many eyes. None that can see. She dreams of being a dancer while her mother dreams an unknowable dream just down the hall. A floorboard creaks.
She stirs as the stuffed toy is prised slowly out of its cage.
With a drowsy reluctance, she opens her eyes.
The man is there.
Together, we shift again, to another time and place.
She is racing through the house, through the kitchen, under the arch and left up the murky green stairs. Step after step, she inclines. Gasping; grappling for purchase on the bannister. I hear her heart thumping in her chest – faster than her footfalls – to the soundtrack of frantic jingling bells. A hand grabs at the swinging tail of the elephant but she yanks at the substantial portion of polyester already in her hold. I see the tail rip from its base as the main body is freed. A hungry hand finds her scrawny ankle and pulls her down to the bottom step then carries her up.
The man has her.

Next, in a bedroom with one whole wall covered in sliding, mirrored panels.
She is surveying the scene of a previous crime, looking for an elephant’s tail.
On her hands and knees she checks under the unmade bed and there, in the dusty space, hides a wooden box. I beg her not to open it but she cannot hear me. I remember that this is her memory and my begging now, just as it was then, is useless.
She retrieves the box, sits cross-legged on the flecked carpet and opens the lid.

I watch signs of confusion spread over her face as she takes in the contents.
Newspaper clippings, yellowed and folded neatly, guarded by her elephant’s bodiless tail. Frowning, she snatches it out. She was about to close the lid but curiosity seized her. Once open in her shaking hands her eyes flicker over the faded black print; skim, skim, skimming over the words

Draper. Aged 9.  Missing.

And underneath, a photograph. A pretty young murdered girl. Smiling widely with gaps in her teeth.

The slamming of a car door startles her away from the page. I see him walk briskly down the pathway towards the house. I beg and plead her to put the box back. She cannot hear me. I scream at her. I cannot help myself. The man is coming.

But instead of doing as I pointlessly insist she moves her gaze to a second page. I fill with dread as I see the man grope into the depths of his pocket to locate his keys.
She hears the key in the door. Moving fast she stuffs the papers back into their wooden enclosure and shoves it back under the bed. She grabs the tail and nimbly flees the room on tip-toes, trying to remember the emboldened words that will not make sense to her for years to come.
The man is home.

I rock back and forth, manically, as she does. I hold an invisible elephant and she holds the only comfort she has known for 14 years. I feel her weaken, her chest rise and fall, her heart slow to a beat that signals that soon it will end and all the while I hear her cries punctuated with shrill screams. Desperate, dying moans. Images flash and flicker. Voices tune in and out. Echoes from the depths of the past. So fast. Little snippets. Fragments of a life.
I almost resign to break the rules but then it’s too late. We are hurtling again, together, deeper into the crevices of her sub-conscious. Pillows. Scissors. White rope and teddy bears. I smell whisky, tobacco, engine grease and lemon cake; strong, sweet and putrid all at once. I hear Buddy Holly, the sound of chewing, and whispering in the dark.

We are thrust into an imageless void where only sounds can be heard. A cacophony rises up; louder and louder. I can hear them, all of them talking over each other but not to each other. We raise our hands to pound our palms into our ears, over and over, to make the noise stop. Our rocking becomes clumsy. Gradually, they drop out one by one by one until, only one chillingly morose voice remains; seeming to seep from in the darkness. In this shared space of memory where only she and I reside, it speaks: ‘You were the reason I married your mother.’

We scream out a terrified sound that comes from the deepest depths of our despair as pain shoots through our chests like fatal arrows shot into our hearts.

And then, silence.
Only silence.

An eerie stillness seizes the room. We are too weak, too sleepy, to react to the stabbing pain; dazed and drifting slowly apart.
She has released me.

She is nearly there. It will soon be over.
She moves only her eyes to the carpet beside her, to the brown bottle that lies empty and lid-less on its side. The back of her head is heavy against the wall barely supported by a limp, thin neck and a spine that is ready to flop. I see her fingers twitch to touch the matted fibres of the pink elephant with the jingly-jangly ear. Their tips move slightly as they stroke their farewell to a faithful friend.

I have lurked in these shadows many times – longed to take her – to free her from her hell but it was destined to be the man’s hand that took her life. That is what is etched in stone on the tablet of her fate. Yet, she beats him to it. She cheats the design and in doing so she prevents a duplication of the event in 1964. She will leave on her own tragic terms, not his.

For as long as she could recall she had yearned, fiercely, to climb out from her own skin. It has constantly itched and prickled at her from inside as if irritant nettle leaves and spikey thistles were growing in its layers. She knew what she must do before he did it. Tonight, empowered by the thought of freedom, she will leave him. She will leave all of them to become peaceful and mine.

She is ready.

I prepare to go to her when I see her arms drop limp to her sides, landing with a quiet thud, palms up. She blinks once, twice, and again. Her torso slides gently sideways, to the right, along the wall that has supported her for all this time. The elephant slides reluctantly from her lap to the floor with a sad and solitary jingle.
Her shoulder passes over the skirting board then meets the carpet. I see her head loll and come to rest, finally, softly, on the floor of her bedroom next to a familiar pink trunk.

Now it is time.

I dart across the room in one breezeless swoop to where she lay; serene and numbed.
I stand in her fading vision. She blinks slowly, heavily – just once; using the last drop of life left in her to focus on me. She can see me now. I know she belongs more to my world now than to hers.

I lean to her and hope that, if any dwindling consciousness remains with her, she will not fear me. ‘It is time’ I say as I place my mouth to her lips. I think the thought I am required to think and in only seconds my work is complete, my kiss has taken her last breath and ceased her failing heart.

Her wide eyes have fixed firm.  The beautiful blue of her irises are eclipsed by the blackened pools of her pupils and up from the beautiful yet ruined form, crumpled and defeated before me, rises a pure and perfect essence.

She gives me her weightless hand then glances back, not in sorrow at the empty human shell or in regret for the life she is leaving behind but in gratitude, at the tailless pink elephant with the jingly-jangly ear. She turns back to me then smiles a smile so almost divine.

I have given my kiss,
and now she is mine.

 

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A Window of Opportunity

 

There is some magical freedom here. Some prospect of some wild thing lurking deliciously on the periphery. Amid the constant rainfall, the dancing candlelight, and the wind; slow droning air then. With no warning, a frenzy. Something burns in the peace of this moment. The curtain billows in response, and cool damp air forces itself under them to cover me. I can feel a subtle spritz where thin and delicate spray is carried in with it.

These past months have brought many a night like this and it amazes me every time how I love this lonely time of night. Although lonely, it is a comfort and is certainly not quiet. It seems like the weather and I are the only forces alive in the street. We are witness to each other; exposed and raw, and showing our hands. It is like we share a time and space, tapped into the moment. Despite the crisp coolness of my cotton sheets and the fact that the window has been open all day in mid-January, I am not cold. I am never cold on these nights but instead I am invigorated by a liveliness to the wild and private peace of the night.

And silence…

The rain stops for the first time in hours. The wind drops, and the curtains settle straight, back into line. I pray the calm is temporary. I pray that the flame will dance again, and that the hairs on my arms will rise to meet the night air once again. The steady drips falling from the gutter brings an unwelcome tedium. Its regularity in the quiet is disturbing; its predictability, stifling. The room feels heavy, and I feel suffocated in the small space of waiting for the next, and the next… a beat that signals that the storm is over, that everything outside will settle down in recovery, that that the wild but welcome moment is over. Eventually the beat will slow, the memory of the freedom of the previous chaos will fade away, and the loneliness creeps in.

But wait… it begins, again. I am pleased…

It returns to drown out the monotony of that boring drip. The wind builds, lashing rain falls in sheets, then twists; blown into disorder before recovering a steady direction, if only for a short time on the already soaked street. That whipping wind: its energy invading the room with such passion and disregard, billowing under the curtain to find my skin. The flame of the candle tries over and over to abide to its natural way; proud and straight, steady and upward but it cannot, the natural way of another thing will not allow it.

The liveliness of this time, on these stormy nights, when one should feel so utterly alone, when the rest of the street sleeps, and one should feel afraid of forces greater than oneself, of their unpredictability that forces a humbling perspective, a strange comfort. Closing the window is never an option on these nights. A freedom in the recognition of powerlessness comes with the reminding presence; a relieving sensation that there is a wildness to life forcing our fluctuations, refusing to allow us to exist being straight and steady. These times reveal the vigorousness behind the mundanity. The window must be open.

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5 minute deadline #3

 

 

It’s a form of self-harm, I think –
To prod and pick for a telling vein
Prominent, thick, and bulging with pain
Each beat in transit, thudding within, is a beg
for chiselled points to dig straight in.
It’s a kind of inkpot, I think –
A source that cannot run dry,
if you dig hard enough,
if the nib is sharp enough. 

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Blink

 

 

Curious blind eyes blink over your pure canvas
And black liquid love sinks in; rhythmic drips
from these furious outlets; seep into you,
Through the tight hairline gaps that form
the tracks of your fibres.

Blood and ink-
Blink, now,
And begin…

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5 minute deadline #2

 

 

Skimming the scenery of this innocent space,
Where now each blink creates, not a trace,
or a droplet, but a torrent tide to tour the mind,
the page; a pace, a place, set for the tragic,

the defaced;

the sublime.

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Mummy Issues

 

This is not what I chose,
You made this murderer of me.

You strove to crush this small
and choiceless hand in your grip
You smiled, I skipped; voiceless,
quick and all the while mute and blind
The stone cold soul behind your grin,
Thin grimacing lips hid invisible whips
and killer ties to bind these wrists.

This is not what I chose
You made this murderer of me.

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5 min deadline #1

 

 

Four little lines should be fair to find,
Easy enough in a short little day where
So much talk talks with nothing to say.
Easier said than effortlessly done
But with what’s left of the voice, that has

mediated, educated, risen, reverberated,
shut down this day, and the noisy next
With four little lines of indulgent text.