Tuesday 30 May 2017

An Encounter

(I found this fragment stapled to another set of replies.  There might be more of it somewhere else, but it's rather nice as it is).

He likes the same music as me... who'd have thought it!  Another trance, folk, world-music, poppy freak in the world.  He seems interesting and interested - rather than just taking about himself.  Unfortunately, and unusually, he doesn't drink, having stopped a few months ago after looking in the mirror one morning after.  Still, no one seems to be perfect.

All in all, a really enjoyable and romantic evening.  And yes, hopefully we will meet again[...]

A Lie

I'd like to tell you about the time I arranged for someone to steal my ex-boyfriend's car and drive it into the sea; revenge for the hours he spent telling me about how camshafts work and my disappointment that the excitement he obviously felt telling me about car engines didn't last the distance from the garage to the bedroom.  I'd like to tell you that, but it wouldn't be true.  What is true is that I used to pretend for hours that I was really interested because I wanted him to sleep with me.

A Memory

(This isn't my memory.  Like all my recent posts it's one of Seven Answers).

I can remember waking up in my cot and wanting people to come.  But they were all still asleep [...], even my sister who slept in a bed, so I stood up by holding onto the wooden white painted rails and boinged my Humpty Dumpty up and down with the hand I wasn't holding on with.

After a long time my mum or dad would come and let me out, or my sister would get out of her bed and come over to chat and play.  I don't think she was able to open the cot front and release me.

I still have the Humpty Dumpty, he is Chad Valley, about the size of a big Easter egg and made of very faded and worn pink and blue velvet.  The elastic for boinging him up and down tore off a few decades ago.

A Fear and a Wish

Deepest fear: moths.

Deepest wish: to stay happy and loved.

Wednesday 24 May 2017

An Encounter

Recently I went to see a band with my girl friends.  It was a fun night and the music was rock covers so we could all sing along and spill beer down our arms.  I pushed down to the front and positioned us right in front of the band.  [...] I could feel someone looking at me and turned to the left where I locked eyes with a very, very good-looking guitarist.  He had green eyes and we had one of those stares where you both dare each other to stop looking first but you can't.  One of those stares that make you want to drop to your knees in front of him.

I broke the gaze eventually and looked at my friends who were both wide-eyed.  'What was that?!' they mouthed and I fanned my red face with my hand.

The rest of the gig it was hard to take my eyes off him.  It was clear that we fancied each other and he even sang along to some of the lyrics while he was staring at me.

After the gig I tapped him on the back and he turned round; his green eyes again.  I said, 'I have two questions for you.  One, was the cute girl standing next to me your girlfriend?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, OK.'

'What's the second question?' he asked.

'That doesn't matter now.'  Pause.  Then in my beery bravado I said, 'You would though, wouldn't you?' and he said that I should come to the gig next Saturday and he would guarantee that she wouldn't be there.

I didn't go, but I did think about it.

Monday 15 May 2017

A House

I spent most of my childhood in a bungalow in the countryside.  Originally it wasn't particularly big but my father built an extension on to it, comprising a dining room and spare room/study.  He also built a double garage to one side.  But the garden was my home - I had a camp at the end of it with a rope ladder and hammock, and I created lots of little cycle paths around all the flower beds.

In the house my favourite place was the attic - it seemed that there was an endless supply of treasure up there: dressing-up clothes, including Mum's wedding dress; a lime green ostrich-trimmed flapper number; a red and white Hawaiian dress; then boxes of old Victorian postcards; naval memorabilia and so on.

My other favourite place to go to on a Saturday morning before everyone else was up was the dog basket, squeezing in with our beagle, even occasionally eating his biscuits.

Thursday 11 May 2017

An Experience

A near-death experience on a retreat in a mountain village.  One week of silence and twelve hours of sitting meditation in a largely unheated monastery of sorts, end of January.  Four days in, I'm nearing a psychological meltdown and start having palpitations that get so bad that I ask for an ambulance.  It takes about half-an-hour to get there and all this time I'm telling myself to just hang on, breathe, the medics will come and sort me out.  But when they do they just hook me up to an EEG thing that beeps along with my heart and stand there, defibrillators in hand, saying that they can't give me any med's as it would be too dangerous.  I guess what I learned there and then is that ultimately your life is in your hands alone, that if you don't muster the will to live, nobody can do it for you.  I still have the printout of my heart-curve, it looks like a blueprint for a roller coaster; a good-luck charm of sorts.

A Dream

 dreamt I was being a drag queen for the first time, getting changed in a public toilet when my ex-partner from 2010 walked past looking fit and healthy but completely oblivious to who I was.  

Thursday 4 May 2017

A Crime or Two

Drink driving; drug dealing and taking; stealing from my place of work; drug smuggling.

A Memory

(This isn't my memory.  Like all my recent posts it's one of Seven Answers).

I must have been about four years old.  I was riding my bicycle which had three wheels.  I loved my bicycle.  But while I was outside, riding around the car park which served the houses in our lane, the police came and took my bicycle away.  This event happened just after my earliest ever memory.  I was in my home with my mother and the police knocked at the door.  Somehow they came inside.  My mother pushed me behind her back as the police entered our living room, two of them, and my mother picked up a glass bottle from the table, smashed the end off and brandished it at the police to make sure they didn't come closer.  It was me they wanted, but they didn't take me that day.  It was the following day when they came again, when I was outside with my bicycle.

Wednesday 3 May 2017

A Wish

I have always wished that I could fly.  I dream about it often - just a slight plié and a certain wriggle of the shoulders and spread of fingers and I am in the air, effortless and easy, gravity having no hold on me.  I have wished it ever since I was a child, on every new moon and every falling star, when I should have been wishing for practical things like a proper job or a functioning car or  a non-dysfunctional family... But I always wish for flight.  I have no fear of heights - I have always known what the world looks like from above, long before I was ever in an airplane.

Tuesday 2 May 2017

An Encounter

[...] I was walking to college one day with my friend and we were busy talking when this boy came towards us that my friend knew.  He and I just stopped and started at each other with eyes like saucers and our mouths open, it was a very peculiar feeling and my friend found it hysterical.  I had never seen anything so beautiful, he was tall, cinnamon-coloured and had hair like a gypsy.  He was exotic and delicious and I had never encountered anyone like this in the miserable town where we lived.

I didn't any longer go to the college but as I was kicking around not dong much I used to go in with my friend sometimes.  After the stare-off I did get to meet him again outside a classroom and I sat on the edge of a table swinging my legs like a child and eating crisps while he painted an extremely awful portrait of me.

We ended up going on a sort of date, although I already had a boyfriend.  The friend, myself and him all went to the pub together and then she left us an we agreed to meet up that evening back in the pub.  I don't remember the time of year, it wasn't winter but it was colourless, cold, damp and dismal.

We wove our way back to his house in the dark in the early evening with a storm chasing our heels and a cheap pizza and wine.  His flat was on the seafront, the waves were crashing up over the barriers and by the time we reached the entrance we were windswept and soaked, which added to the romance.  I knew nothing about him and he seemed to be a bit of a loner, but it never occurred to me not to go off with him on my own.

His flat was minute and sparse and seemed to be in a retirement block, which was an odd place for a 20 year old to live, I think he had inherited it.  His artwork was all over the walls, it was bad, childish and unconsidered in its approach and the subject mater was wolves, monsters and men devouring women.  In his tiny bedroom he had an array of weapons on his windowsill: knives and equipment used for martial arts.

We got even more drunk, ate the pizza and ballroom-danced around the flat to Pyscho Killer.  We stood out on the balcony and watched the sea roaring, it felt desperately romantic and as we were so high up it looked as if the sea was directly below us and we were right out in it.

I never got to meet my friend that evening, but I also never saw him again, his deliciousness was offset by an attentiveness that gave me the creeps.  When I think back I am not sure if he was a really lovely man and I was too young to appreciate the potential or he was a complete weirdo - sometimes there's a fine line.