There is a bird I want to hold close, but I’m so frightened of what’s to come. I think it’s lost direction, and the wind has made the South seem North to him. Please, oh please, could I keep him close to me? I wouldn’t know what to do if he flew the wrong way.
Category: Stories
just speak
“Find what it is,” he told her, but she’d been finding it for weeks now and she never found what it was. She never understood.
“I just can’t stand by myself, that’s what it is.”
But she knew it was more than that, and she looked at him with exhausted eyes.
“The presence of other people is only a temporary fulfillment,” he said. “Listen to yourself. Really listen to yourself.”
She leaned back until she hit the floor with surrender. “That’s the problem! I can’t. There’s nothing there, there’s nothing speaking to me! What am I suppose to do with that? The last time I did, I made a mistake, and there are just so many people to take care of in this world, so why should I be as selfish to make time for myself? Every time I walk out of that door, it’s always the same room. This has always been a problem, don’t you see? Don’t you see how there just isn’t any solution?”
He looked at her in defeat and let out a sigh that probably made the air thinner than it should have been.
“Just give me your eyes,” he said.
Then the world went black.
what she told me last night
“Don’t run when you’re scared,” she said to me.
I had my feet on the ground, fists clenched, and a vigorous fight with the tears held back in my eyes. It looked like I had it all, but really, I was breaking inside.
She came up to me and tried to take me by the hand.
“What if it all goes away?” I asked her. She probably had three of my fingers in her hand by then. The water in front of us came to a slow ripple, its shades in both pink and blue, as if images were being reflected off the water. Apart from us and the water before us, darkness was what surrounded us.
“Don’t think too much about the prospect, dear,” she said, and I relaxed my shoulders, with a look of defeat on my face.
“What if it all goes away?”
ambition
I am all too prosaic around you. Had I ruined those times? Had I put a kick in you just right? You were all too accepting, and my guilt of ruining you has rested a dark, shallow pool in the bottom of my heart.
I could not thank you enough for staying around. Of all minds, you are one who continues to invade my days with welcomed nonsense. There are times when you have collided with the present, and I am not sure what it is you feel when it does. However, remember you were one I had sought for in bad times, and you knew that it was a mocking laugh that would cure me.
You have only gone so far past the horizon. I hope you continue that way with your fishline tugging on the rest of us, so that not only are we behind, but not an inch too far away from you too.
visualised.
She was so reticent; finding an equilibrium meant running to the far edge of a pivoting plank of wood. Only recently had he learnt how to play.
Their silent games of noughts and crosses, with her hand lethargically placed under her chin, continued as she traced pictures on the crumpled blanket.
“Can we go to bed now?” she asked.
He scratched in an ‘O’ on the piece of paper that lay between them and looked up to meet her eyes. She nodded her head to the side, curious.
“No,” she answered. She shuffled to meet his lap and turned to look up at his face.
you’ve only gotten so far
He always thought to himself “What did I do to deserve someone like this?”
She, in all her beauty, was a cynosure amongst others, and he a simple backdrop.
I remember him looking down at the bricked ground below us, his feet gripped on the fence and both his hands and soul hanging off the edge. I told him never have I seen such troubled eyes so content with someone before.
“I can’t even look her in the eyes sometimes,” he told me. I could only laugh lightly and look at what he felt was an ignominy.
“Try it someday,” I told him. “Her beauty is the least of her qualities.”
cheers to the empty glass (22.8.16)
23/8/16
Imagine the morning dew. The cold as it hits you like silk. You look out to trees, a washed out sky, everything so still yet alive.
The sun is out bright, but the breeze hugs you close. You have your hands around a warm mug of hot chocolate, steam dancing in the empty air. Take a sip, breathe the air in. Then come back to this awful reality.
25/8/16
In the midst of a hollow forest, you will see a man. Under swindled trees looming above, he will look at you and jester you to come over. With his rotting shoulder bent to one side, face with burnt scars, his bright eyes are filled with darkness, and he gives you a sweet smile.
“Come with me,” he says. And you take what’s left of a hand.
cleo
If you could imagine a lemon, it’d be her. But maybe she was more like lemonade put outside of the fridge for too long. Upon involuntary conversation, she sat herself at the corner with crossed legs on the stool beneath her. Tucked in was a woman in a baggy sweater, ripped jeans, and the fulfillment of the occasional tap of her menthol cigarette. Fraudulent eyes stared at the screen of her phone in a bask of secret disinterest. Perhaps life was just a burden for her. Perhaps she didn’t even care.
Taken from my post at 92 Degrees
no sign of a wishbone
It took about 3 looks through the window before I got the motivation to get myself off my chair and stride out that door. He was sitting idly alone with an open book in his hands and eyes everywhere but there. With hair scuffled and owl-looking glasses, perhaps he’d been looking through those plastered stickers on the window in hopes of arriving coffee. He was unfazed by the current of people across him with a dose of gossip to seize their appetite.
A single chair sat across him, and an impractical option at his side. I asked if he was bored.
“Don’t worry, I’m only waiting for my friends to come over,” he said, and I asked if he minded me sitting with him.
It didn’t take long for us to discover our mutual love for both art and photography. It also happened to be that I had a book on me too, and stashed in his tote bag was an analog camera. By 10 pm, his friends had left, both of us were still around, and his eyes were on contemporary poetry, with a little more preoccupation this time.
For someone of the same age, he was years ahead. Well-presented, polite, ambitious, committed; I wouldn’t be surprised if a few girls knocked over a few chess pieces for him. And family? Well, family was his absolute priority.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet him a second time, now a skinhead with a weak attempt to hide it with a hat, but nevertheless still as affable and courteous as before. We didn’t have the time on our hands to talk as much as before, but we made sure to say our swift hellos. With the apparent frequency he comes by here, I wouldn’t be surprised if I bumped into him again.
Taken from my another blog at 92 Degrees
the peculiar case of life’s irregularity
Safety was my number one priority. That was exactly why I’d have my helmet on my handlebar at the ready in the case of a worst case scenario like a car crashing into me or Gertrude, who sat 2 seats away from me in class, confessing her erratic love for me on a bike of her own. I devised that if I were to fall I would reach for the helmet’s straps and flip the helmet onto my head just before I crashed to my most untimely death, that I could only hope to miraculously survive. I had thought about this marvelous plan last night with Robert, my seatmate, and a penguin with the head of a Chihuahua, called Frank.
Unfortunately, out of the two cases mentioned it was exactly the latter that happened after school. Gertrude, with her insane smile, had a bunch of roses clasped in one hand, the other on the handlebar so that she could keep up with my frantic turns and circles through several streets to put her off. Apparently Robert thought it would be funny to give her a bouquet with a love letter and say they were from me. It went a little something like this:
Dear Gertrude,
Please come to my house at 9 and we will have a lovely fuck with candles lit everywhere on a bed of satin and silk.
Yours,
Alasdair
I did not want to have a lovely fuck with Gertrude. Robert brushed it off and said that I’d have the time of my life; perhaps her acne would start popping like popcorn from the overwhelming heat of the candles surrounding our “sexual territory”. I could only groan.
“How’d you get her to go away anyway?” he said, pitting the cigarette he had had in his mouth.
“I hid in the bushes and told her I wanted some time alone to have a good wank.”
I could sense the grin on his face now as he looked at the street in front of us. We were sitting at my porch.
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, she left and told me to have a good one.”
I preferred not to mention how Gertrude had actually jumped onto me from the side beforehand, making me stumble onto the pavement with our bikes clashing together. Sadly the helmet plan didn’t work, but the helmet did work as a good weapon to get her hands off my legs as I scrambled into the bushes. Telling her about my beastly need to wank in the midst of nature had gotten her to leave, but something told me that she’d still be at my door in less than ten minutes.
I looked at Robert who was now smoking his fifth cigarette. His eyes were boring into the wall of graffiti across, whilst mine were hysterically checking the trees. It would have been logical to run or hide under my bed covers, but we both knew all too well that it wouldn’t help. I took a quick gaze into the sky, then to the fence, and then to the neighbour’s gnome. Then I looked at him again, this time with a bit more calm. Something had clicked.
I slowly turned my head back, and Robert twitched in return. He exhaled, slowly shaking his head to himself with an ashamed grin that was quickly wiped away. He gave me one deadpan look, and told me it wouldn’t work.
*
It's Raining Umbrellas 