six; knots in time

the first time i ran into her, i was carrying my shopping home and i didn’t really notice until it was too late. it was getting dark and my eyes lingered where they never had before and her face was imprinted on me for the weeks to come. i couldn’t blink without her face staring at me, like i was a poison in her very veins. it set me on fire, bouncing back between my bones like a game i didn’t want to play in the first place. but that feeling stuck with me, stuck inside of me.

my fingers were bouncing at the tip of who she was. where i had seen her face before, where i knew her dark eyes, and her slanted lips from – who was she, and where did she come from?

i didn’t sleep for three days, and my caffeine fuelled body hallucinated bugs all over the walls, and i was crying because i couldn’t get the washing machine to work – and i remembered. i remembered her face and i stood up straight. she was me, she was me but she was so far advanced – so far forward that her hair no longer frayed at the ends where i bleached it blonde when i was twenty two. she had all the buttons on her coat, and she had perfectly manicured nails. she was pulled together like a toy stitched at it’s seams and pulled into another universe.

i didn’t see her for a few years then, as i continued living a life i was unsure about, steady shaky stances and cowardly corners all turned into a life i was sure i had no way of escaping. i was locked here, as who i am with no escape.

i saw her on a train that day. i was reading a book, and so was she, but her eyes didn’t slip over half the page like mine did – they were steady and she peered through her glasses like she could actually finally see – like everything before her was stretched into perfection, like a linear line of wonder. she didn’t look up at me, she probably never would because i was pushed so far below her, i wouldn’t even show up on the radar that scanned her lungs, but i felt it in mine.

i saw her once more, before the final time. and i was sitting in a coffee shop, and she stood between me and a boy who had been flashing his soul-winning smile at me across a latte and she wandered through like she owned the place. she apologized, with a voice that i recognized from my own body and i was too shocked to reply. but still, her eyes glazed over me and i felt a cold wind pass through me, as two knots in time overlapped – as they slipped past each other and touched fingers so suggestively that i still shudder. she was wearing a pencil skirt and was holding a laptop bag across her shoulder and her lips were golden red and she was perfect. she was everything i strove towards, and could never envision – personified and stripped bare. i looked back at my coffee, and back at the boy and i almost forgot about her, suddenly overwhelmed.

the last time was the strangest. i stepped from the shower. i could hear the hum of the tv in the background and there was too much steam to breathe deeply but happiness spread through my veins like i was driven by it. i walked to the mirror and let the steam evaporate off it’s surface and there she was. i could feel my body contracting, as though my memory had been removed by a snake. it could never be possible, any of this – all of this. i was a shell of what i once was, but even more of a shadow of what i could become, and i was messy and broken and limp and staring right back into my own eyes. i felt the knots that had once overlapped, fall together, in place.

five; harris

(better late than never, and better never than dead)
-----

i’d brought their coffee out with a smile on my lips that plagued my day. there were tables full of people, of mothers gossiping, of men in suits and women with their minds shuffling papers they knew they had to write. there were misfits and lovers and friends with awkward half-hearted waves of greeting. and i was standing with an off-white apron tied around my hearty waist, balancing as many double-shot-skim-milk-extra-hot-lattes as i could in my over encumbered arms. i whittled my day away, watching eyes glaze over me, grunting appreciation with my hard work, growing ever more anxious and annoyed with every second the clock ticked.

it had taken me a moment, then, to realize when he walked in. his hair was a tousled blonde mess, and he rubbed his gloved hands together, as he tried to shake the cold out of his skin – welcoming the warmth of our overfilled, hideaway coffee house. his eyes had scanned the room, subtly – almost invisibly, until he located me, stacking shelves with a new delivery of coffee beans.

hey his voice was casual. he didn’t mean to bump into me, it was coincidence really, he probably had never picked up on the fact that i was here every tuesday between nine and ten.

oh hey harris, i had replied.

we talked in small sentences of kind words and appreciation while i finished my job. we bumbled and mumbled while i made his large hazelnut cappuccino – politely avoiding the sparks that feasted between our silhouettes.

would you, maybe, when you finish one day, maybe, come back to my house, he stumbled, i’ve got some books i’m pretty sure you’d be very interested in.

and i was sure he did. we’d spoken every few days for months now, a very bleak green light, shimmering at the end of my dock.

i’d agreed, of course. i’m sure that’s what i had been waiting for – isn’t that always the way, i would never have admitted it, but something about his nonchalance and love of greek poetry really spoke to my inner clockwork.

we giggled as we left the coffee shop a few hours later. pulling our coats over our small frames, forever shrunken by the large city around us. we were chatting with ease, flying through conversation with brief moments of sullen spurs as our hands bumped in our wandering gait. and finally we found a front door, painted blue, tucked between a chinese restaurant and a seven-eleven.

we walked in, and climbed over a half-built model train set, and a bootleg copy of anchor man and finally reached his lounge-room. he lived alone, in a single bedroom, very small unit. very small. small enough to see every nook and every cranny, and to see every photo that was plastered to the walls of his house, like an open investigation of a crime scene. i spotted myself between a young man with a tattoo of a tiger on his arm, and a middle-aged woman, driving a van. i thought very clearly well this is odd – as he pulled a chloroform rag across my face.

four; genevieve

she had never heard silence before – not really, not once. she was born alongside him, born with his words battling hers, competitive and aggressive and his own. she loathed him and she loved him, loved him like a familiar tumor, turning your stomach inside out – but really what else are you supposed to do when you’re born with the voice inside your head.

there wasn’t silence, there was conversation, there were sleepy mumbles and hasty grumbles and feisty remarks, and there was lingering lust and subconscious whispered confessions. and just like that, genevieve had never lived a day of her life alone. they had just grown together like twisted trees, and she never batted an eyelid.

they called him a phase, a deep deep desire to never let her body wither all alone and unconscious. they drugged her and whispered into her sleeping ears, praying to the good sweet lord that whatever daemon possessed her would slip out silently like tears. but what they never noticed was the haphazard sultry whispers that always brought him back. genevieve spoke with the words of the wind, in tunes that only existed in lands long since extinguished – and it was her curled tongue that kept the voice anchored to her mind. they all watched her, watched her walk with poise and watched her talk with eloquence – they watched her exist entirely honestly and whole and they worried. how can a girl, a girl so small and so aware, how could she live in a world knowing that her mind was shared with invisibility – shared with blank space, a blank canvas, that could never be whole, not ever exist outside of her soul.

like a town with pitchforks the people protested. protested to the profanity they didn’t know existed – protested to the potent potential lies that encrusted a young girls mind, capturing her in a land of make believe and mystery.

and one day when they were napping, curled together like an over-grown plant – tucked between a tree and wooden shed, sharing secrets and screaming subtleties - they came for her.

the priest had a face like a rock – curved in ways that would never change, not for the wind and not for the ocean – he was hard and cruel and kind, wrapped together in a coat of bruises. and he whispered words to her open wounds, ignoring the screams that slipped from her lips – ignoring the fact that he didn’t know if they were even coming from inside her.

the family that once held her dearly, stood with eyes wide and milky, confused and mad at the man they themselves had created, begging to destroy their own monster.

nobody asked genevieve, nobody asked if his voice hurt her ears, or if his view of politics disagreed with her own. nobody asked her if he annoyed her, if he drew her attention away from the words on a page, and forced her to stop breathing. nobody asked her – and so they didn’t know. they didn’t know the voice talked her off the edge of a cliff. the voice stopped her hands when they pressed too hard against her wind-pipe. they didn’t ask because they thought they were right, in all the wrong ways.

once the stone-faced priest had left all his words floating in the air, plucking at the hairs at the back of her neck, she felt him shift. the voice that always tucked between her left ear, and the crook of her neck, the voice that she was born listening to – lived next to, and shared her life with. he was being pulled from her, like poison through a vacuum.

an inexistent family watched with horror plastered on their ignorant lips. their eyes swelled into white puddles, dripping across their faces as they watched her distort. watched her tear in two. they cried in confusion as the man walked away from her. she was small, she was so small and now she was half of what she once had been. the man was bigger, but he was wrong. his face was impossible to look at, and his body bent in ways that ignored every rule ever written. genevieve cried then, cried in confusion and pain and solidarity.

the man made a noise that nobody heard, it was pain and impossibility and terror – it was confusion and unbearable shifted smoke, and he was homeless – lost and wandering. he stared at genevieve with an intensity that nobody could see, except her. and she watched, watched with her withered body as he escaped. she saw regret and terror in his face, and she saw his legs move with an uncanny swiftness that was not necessary. they could not see him, they never would, they would never understand as long as she lived.

she lost control of her legs, she lost control of the contorted movement of her limbs and she collapsed in a pile of broken sinew and shredded bone and she cried tears of white blood cells and she broke clean in half – and she watched half of her run past her house, and slide down the road. and she screamed, watching her family erupt, watching their panic as she knew that she was never going to be the same, never going to move with poise again.

for genevieve’s seventeenth birthday, she asked for a new red bicycle, or a set of encyclopaedias to line up along her shelf, like the set she admired at her grandmothers. instead she got an exorcism.

three; so i didn't

i didn't want to miss today. i didn't want to fail again. and this was the best i could do. i'm sorry, i am very sorry.

there was a shotgun and a bullet and they tunneled together –

clutching their dirty bodies together in a tantrum storm.

i watched the blood spread like fingers of a fist across my chest.

it was a lifetime of oh god I’m so sorry please don’t.

so i didn’t.

i felt words pull my flesh from my ligaments,

and i squashed like overdone legumes,

and i crumpled into a pile of once-was has-beens.

i felt my world tear, i felt realities separating,

like sand through glass.

so i didn't.

i was the calm of the ocean at midnight.

i was the silence of darkness and

i was the stillness of new born death.

i settled like dust, over every orifice of desk-space and book-shelf and camcorder.

i settled in your lungs and i tried, with all my might.

to trick you, just once more,

just for one more minute.

two; penpals

nobody thought it was strange that the sun had stopped rising in the east. nobody questioned the fact that technically the world was spinning backwards, that days were running in reverse. nobody noticed that they woke up and ate breakfast when the sun was backing away from the earth, rather than merrily approaching it. everybody was too busy looking at screens, and at papers, and at each other to notice one tiny little detail, like that. 

the sun thought it was funny, at first - watching the world carry on without a doubt in their minds. watching them flutter through their days, watching their feet march them through harmonious routines, watching them kiss each other when they arrived home at the end of a long day (still unaware they were doing it backwards) and telling dull stories everybody pretended were mildly amusing. he thought it was all very amusing, until one day - it wasn’t.

how insignificant did somebody have to be, before nobody saw him? before nobody noticed that he had tricked them all, before he became such an oblivious mess that nobody dared to look at him. the sun was sad.

the people, however - didn’t notice this either. they never noticed the light starting to dim, the way that the day shrunk in size, like it had been put through the wrong cycle in the washing machine. they carried on their days, only bothering to rush a little more, to get the milk before the shops closed when the sun finally made his descent. 

“oh they are silly little creatures,” the moon mumbled, one day as she drifted past her lifelong friend, “they never notice anything - especially things that don’t involve them.”

and the sun was hesitant to agree, because he saw them compliment hair, and clothes, and choice in books - he saw them hold hands, and tongues and try their best to please others. he knew they couldn’t all be too bad, when he saw them share their food, knowing the hunger of their own. they couldn’t be so bad, so by the logical deductions of life, the only thing failing in this relationship - was the sun himself. 

he shone brighter then, trying to catch attention - he flew into an over enthused life of torture, burning himself from the outside, in - trying with all his might to please the people who never took the time to look up, to look him in the eyes and whisper their appreciation. he was nothing, he realised soon, he was nothing to them - other than a source of light in which for them to admire themselves.

he lived lonely then, without a positive thought to keep him company. he pushed away the moon and the stars and he closed his eyes when he had to give off light (which he did, because he was kind-hearted and loving, despite his dishonest receivers) he turned off his brain, and stared dully into the darkness that seemed to be his existence. 

there was a boy, who had lived for a whole twelve years, and in those twelve years he noticed a number of things. he noticed that it doesn’t matter if you watch the pot, or if you don’t - it will take the exact same amount of time, only one way lets you use your time more productively, and so he changed the saying to “a watched pot is merely a waste of time.” and he noticed that his father had brought the wrong paint for the second half of their newly renovated house, when the start was off-cream, and the end seemed to be pale custard - but he also knew how hard his father had tried, and so he never mentioned it. he knew that people liked to be told nice things, and that they also liked to sit down at the end of the day, and take their shoes off - in fact, he knew a lot of things. and he knew that the sun was sad. 

“it’s winter,” his father had scoffed. “this is what happens in winter,” and maybe it was, the boy thought - maybe it was, but this time it wasn’t. nobody asked him how he knew this, nobody even believed him, but that was okay. this boy was special, and he knew what he knew, and nobody had to tell him otherwise. 

he wrote a letter, first - a letter listing his appreciation, and his undefined love for the sun, for the warmth he gives off, for the light, for the way that he felt both of them touch his heart when he walked to school in the morning - knowing that this was a very pure form of fondness, being caressed right through his ghostly flesh. he told him that he was sorry that he was sad, and that he was sure it wasn’t worth it. it’s never worth being sad, when instead you can be happy. happiness is warm too, so maybe if the sun wasn’t feeling happy, that’s why he felt so cold, and in turn that coldness made him unhappy. the boy knew about this cycle and he warned his friend, that some day - some day very far in the future, this could all have been avoided, because he knows it is hard, but he knows it is possible. finally he told the sun that he loved him, and he hoped he would be okay, and he hoped that his heart would mend itself because he was fond of the sun that he once was, but he was great the way he is now, too - but just, it’s not always best to change when you’ve become very negative.

the sun cried for a few days, when he received a letter tied to a balloon - he cried because his hot fingers burst the balloon, and the balloon was very pretty, and he cried because he felt his heart thaw. the people on the earth didn’t notice his tears, despite the very wet day they had - and they carried on like normal, this time with umbrellas. the sun wrote back, with much haste. he was not fixed, not by any long shot - but he felt thawed and refreshed and scrubbed raw, but he had a friend now. a single friend in an infinite universe, and that made him important. 

hello old friend

a new year, and a new month, and a new day, and a new start.
these are all the things that january brought around, dragging it by the scruff of it's neck and here we are again.

i wont make a promise i can't keep - and i wont try and make myself do something that my heart isn't fully invested in, but i want to try.

i like writing, and i like words, and i like the sounds they make, rolling off tongues, and pouring into cups and tumbling through the empty space. i like stories and tales of high-hopes and misguided memories and scary thoughts. i like to tell people things to distract them, or to make them forget something bad, for only a split-second, and i know i'm not very much - but i hope i'm something.

i want to tell more stories this year - as many as i can, so i wont try and force things out, i wont panic and stress and tell myself that i am worthless for not being able to think of a boys name when instead i want to sit in my pyjamas, eating icecream while watching trash. but i will always try.

hello 2014, my name is jessica - i don't like making promises, and i'm starting this year freshly scarred, scared and vulnerable, so please be kind. i'm just here to say some words.

say hello if you're reading, because god-knows i hope you are.

xox
jess.