Double Decker Bus

That’s when I began thinking of losing you. This isn’t the first time I am writing of loss and best friends and bits of my heart and people going away. It’s just that, with you, the deep sad sorrow I chose to immerse myself in and all the parallel universes I conjure for these words, for my sanity, it came true. And we are sad about that, which is good, isn’t it, because deep sad sorrow is the appropriate emotion for situations like this?

My point though, in writing this to you, and these words come after I sat nibbling my fingers for a moment, is that loss isn’t romantic. As much as I vindictively wish that our painful parting of ways provided fiery fodder to the flaccid fuels (fools) of my imagination, there is no such thing happening – and we can see that here, can’t we? I can employ no wordplay and I shall join you in laughing at all the obvious attempts at making this seem literary.

I am always hiding, and my words are no miraculous insight into my truth. They are the closest I shall come to surface, and that’s the best I can do. You know that, don’t you? You loved my lies, and my fiction loved you back.

Loss hasn’t matured me. It has not suffered me, and it has left me precisely where it found me (that was a reference to a quote you loved from Chicken Soup for the Soul, it was the only book you ever read in the library). I don’t think either of us value or miss each other more than we ever did, so really, what is loss if it isn’t pillow tears, sad poetry and nearly dialing a number? My inventive what-ifs are so much more realistic than this pathetic reality.

Because this then, is what loss is. It is awkward words and a verbose mind running astray, too much thought and too much reflection. It’s waking up one day and realizing he doesn’t matter anymore (he is so ridiculous anyway), you could kiss him and hold him and marry him and have three children with him; we are all selfish people, and there is nothing we crave more than everything which makes us happy, and if we have to pick between two, you pick whichever one you can keep around more often, and his address was nearer. How can I blame you (except when I did)?

Loss is when you can thrive happily without everything which made your days and who you’ve had breakfast with for years. It’s when I realize it’s just one story less, and really, these things don’t matter that much. People come, people go. I shall too.

This is me, taking a deep breath, and breaking out to the surface. Just for a moment, just long enough to say you can love him and love me too. 

You are in my way, and I cannot reach you. 

I cannot love you back, 

if you drown me in all of yours -

But I have loved you so much,

That I have drowned in mine.

(Source: startwiththealphabet)

To be labourers sweating, construction workers, on a hot summer day, sweat rolling down the doughy lines of my back.

Perspiration, aching arms; sweet worldly proof of the weight of loving you.

We would stand on the edges of a rusty wire fence, awkwardly squinting into the sandy rock we would dig together. And we would dig, shovel scraping away, not talking much because this is all about real things, like how clothes stick to you and squelch when you pull them away, or how wet salty strands sticking to the nape of your neck is really not any kind of any Saki romantic.

I would see your hands tremble, your teeth grit, when rocks and gravel warm with the sun wouldn’t give in, and I would do nothing, say nothing, and we would go on, deeper, quietly, because we want to create something grand, and to lay the bricks, bury them alive, in safe secure graves, lay us immortal. Touching metal implements, our caked fingers mellow baking with their burn, false tribal tan streaks on our forehead. 

In concrete and lime fizzle, I will leave the delicacy of words and all the riddles of language far behind. In so much time and so many confessions, what good have we come to, really? 

Let’s make this up, make our own shade and shelter, holding bricks together with a mesh of patched up jeans and grey shirts which will always reek of exhaustion.

I want to build with you, that’s just how you make me feel. 

(Source: startwiththealphabet)

FINALLY.

History, here I come. 

Because I’m on a vacation in the mountains, and I write this sitting quite literally ‘in’ a cloud, with firs outside the window.

The Muse is having a good time.

Crisp capsicum tossed in, hot and sizzling.

If I could have a plate of that by my laptop right now, I promise the Muse I’d write  a thousand words.

(Such fun to see).

She quietly walked through the garden, a formal postal envelope in her hand, looking at leaves and flowers closely. It was a hot summer afternoon, and she was a pretty little girl.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked her, over the fancy bamboo fencing around her front garden.

She looked at me suspiciously, the envelope slowly slid behind her back, into the cotton folds of her summer cherry print frock. ‘I don’t want to tell,’ she said, and she shuffled away, the bright sunlight falling on the delicate poppies in the garden and the glittering studded butterfly clips in her black hair.

‘All right, I’ll show you.’

She held the envelope gingerly, carefully, in her hand, and came forward. I leaned towards her, over the fence. 

Ladybirds. Through the transparent bit of the envelope, I could see it was full of tiny ladybirds - red and golden and beautiful. 

They will die, I told her, don’t they look prettier on the leaves?

She didn’t take too much time - she slowly shook the envelope on the grass, letting the insects crawl out. She watched their pretty polkas take over and blend in the colours of her sultry foliage. 

I smiled at her before she quietly went back into the house, stopping only for a minute to gently unclip a sequinned butterfly from her hair, and to give it to me.

This will live, she said.