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.

one; alexander

by the time alexander reached the fork in the road, he had already forgotten why he had started walking to begin with. he knew he was mad about something – and he knew that something had happened to make him mad. but with every step he took, every corner he turned, he felt his anger slowly subside into a dull roar in the back of his chest. and now, now he had forgotten what had driven his decision – and he was standing at a very distinct fork in the road. 

to the left he was staring at a road paved with red bricks, lined with autumn swept trees and a smell of burning caramel – a scent that faintly reminded him of a grandmother he was sure he must have had, despite the obvious gaps in his mind. to the right he saw green, mossy stones lining an evident path, and trees overcome with green leaves and swollen berries, the air was crisper this way – he could taste the freshness that the right path took. and yet he still felt torn. 

he took the path to the left, because sentimentality overrides any other emotion – even when you aren’t exactly sure why it was sentimental. and so he walked down the red path, thinking of scorched sugar, almost tasting it on his suddenly hungry tongue. 

for a minute, alexander was sure he remembered a strange man being in his house – a strange man with a black top-hat and an almost-cape. he was tall and booming and he was leaning against the kitchen bench drinking tea out of a mug that alexander was sure he did not own. almost remembered. 

when his legs began to ache, and tiredness stretched out from his bones, clutching onto his flesh and dragging it internally – that was when he thought maybe he should rest for a while. 

as though by magic a house appeared almost instantly over the horizon. a small orange cottage with fields overflowing with lilacs and lilies and daisies. it was quaint and cozy and so familiar that alexander was sure he felt his heartstrings tug.

“hello alex” a voice said, creaking through the silence like an unhinged door.

“hello grandmother,” he replied – of course this is why he was here. of course this was why he had taken the familiar path. he must have been walking to his grandmothers on purpose. he must have been. how foolish he was to forget. 

she ushered him inside, almost as though he was a sheep that constantly needed to be herded. it was unlike him, his grandmother thought – he was normally so bright, so intelligent and so independent, and now he was running on an empty tank with a mind set in only one gear – forward. but she shrugged it off as she pushed him towards the isolated dining room table. she was tugging his coat off his back, and pushing tea towards him in a matter of seconds. and alexander was letting his eyes wander over everything. that clock, oh he knew that clock – of course he did, how could he have forgotten – he was sure he hadn’t. his mind was erasing everything that it had already erased. 

“how is your mother?” the grandmother had asked, and alexander had replied with “she is very well, thankyou.” but now the more that he thought about it, the more he wasn’t so sure his answer was very truthful. there was still a tall dark man in a very tall top-hat lingering in the back of his mind, and where had that man gotten his mug, when it definitely didn’t belong there. 

soon alexander found himself in a bed that he knew he once slept in, and his mind felt like it was breaking out of it’s shell. it was creaking and groaning and swelling where it once never dwelled. he was remembering what colour his bedroom really was, and he was remembering how his mother took her tea, and how he had a dog named buster. 

and then he heard the clock on the wall strike midnight and he was running from his bed as fast as he could. he ran back through the kitchen, past the empty tea-set and past his sleeping grandmother. and he was running down the autumn stained path until he hit the fork in the road – and he ran home. he ran home with all the force of the world propelling every step that he took. his heart swelled with fear, with terrified, horrible, ugly fear – not for himself, but for his mother – his mother who he turned and walked away from, sitting in the kitchen beside a tall dark man, with a top hat, and an almost-cape.