Episolaries: Letters From The People I Could Have Become

i. I should have waited for magic. I don’t think I really believed in it, so if it ever had been there, I would have been blind to it. Once you’ve realised how much you’ve passed by, there’s no going back- not just to ...

ii. I would like to demonstrate my relationship with time: it blows past me, like some uninvited house guest whose comings and goings I am constantly missing.

iii. Not home, house, I don’t have a home. I used to want one but now I’m not so sure. Not everyone deserves a home.

iv. I make a game of fear. I take it too far. I am afraid to ask what you make of it, even more afraid to wonder why. If I were to be able to pinpoint a time or place in my past at which it started, I would not be able to play anymore. Everything depends on being a player.

v. Look at me and I know what you’ll see- violent-eyed, cocked chin. I’m the kind of presence you would shrink away from. You’d still be painfully trusting, you’d still give yourself away, but I’d want none of what you got from all of this. You might see the black and blue, the damage, but that’s only if you get past the ivory tower.

vi. The phonetics of grief. Rampant rule-bender. Habitually unkempt. Habitually rebellious. Habitually wrong. I’ve been shut in so many boxes, years ago I learnt to hold my breath for years at a time. Walls are just views of mountains or skylines, depending on how you look at them.

vii. They bickered awhile, chaos in the fading light. A few umbrellas opened indoors.

viii. You must be able to hear it too, as the moon spins, baring its teeth. I have used myself and regret only follows. You are not somebody’s old coat to throw about as they please. Waiting for your backbone to pick you up- it will not arrive. Waiting for magic- I can’t tell you what to do, because perhaps believing in magic is a better way to go- but that never arrived either. The waiting place- you know of it- I don’t want you to find yourself there.

ix. This is freedom. It will be worth it if you learn patience.

x. Years and years, canvases side to side. Do not leave them as they are, please. You could do worse, but you could do so much better.

Write what hurts

Being free to leave and not being ready.
Crying (some good will come of this).
Hearing another human cry.
Actual growth and the grief in it.
Impatience growing here.
Fate, if there is such a thing- having other plans.
Recurring attempts to build character.
Inherrent corruption.
For the sake of argument.
Tastless excess.
Exhausted Christmas lights.
What crossed my mind.
A language nobody else understands.
What costs you when it's arbitrary.
Exclusion.
Indistinct goodbyes.
Goodbye.

The Guitarist's Ghost

Doubt, doubt, so far from shore, too tired to wave, too light-headed to drown, farway but not quite unhinged- how long could one carry on waiting for something to happen? If one were to be quiet enough and still enough for long enough- maybe they could somehow transcend the void. Balancing precariously in between existed a no-man's land of confusion and dread for those who were looking for a means to an end, to tie the loose ribbons into a bow, to bury the box under the roses. Waiting, waiting- there is a part of him still in the room, lingering.
Listening, the ticking away of seconds, the hum and click of hot water running through pipes, the thrum of the walls, distant doors opening, closing, and beyond, life- engines, motion, work, a threshold to cross. Is that the sound of a flutter of air against a taught guitar string? It is unfair, do you not think, that our possessions can outlive us? That an unfortunate arrangement of scrap metal and plastic and dials and faces and hands, inanimate and flat, existed longer in this tangible realm than he could have, or should have, or would have if he'd let himself- he was made of so much more.
But he had endured only thirty-two years before giving up his flesh and let his blood out into the bathtub, swept a flood through the rooms that seeped down into the basement. Beyond that flood he left behind just these lifeless reminders of his legacy.
The watch would beep once for the half hour and twice on the hour. It's easy to lose count of how many times the beeps signal passing hours and half hours, lying awake, lying in between, wondering about the other side. Wondering why and why and why and why and how will the acoustics of this place he had strummed and sung the words that he then kept in his heart chambers but now could not be located, could be not be scattered like ashes or pushed out to sea like the tidal wave from the bathtub, could not be explained or heard as they always had and were assumed to always be. There was that song I had meant to ask about, a song conjuring images of whale sounds and ocean bed orchestras- what did it mean to him when he'd written it, how did he mean it to be heard when he sang it. Not knowing is a quagmire, a vacuum, a moment between two telephone calls two minutes apart, both with the same message- he is gone. Will his melodies turn my dreams of his performances to nightmares? Will the standing ovations of my sleep become cold sweats? Why did the whales occupy his thoughts enough to swim across the frets of his guitar? Did they know something about him that I never will? His music is a message- now it's a whole new kind of message. A haunting.
There have been more questions to ask of him after his suicide than there have been minutes since I last heard his voice. I am still, I am quiet, I am waiting. Then again, he made his choice, so what now is mine? Do the whales and the swans, the greenhouses and the green glass bottles. the library's morning dust shafts and the rattling keys, the old tyres in the garage and the carvings in the sycamore, the mishapen ashtray spun from clay and the pedals under the pottery wheel- do they mean what they did when he made them matter so much in those songs, his songs, those that made me love him, more than I otherwise would have if he had never sung them to me.
All there really was to find in that waiting place was a lonely half-slumber wherein time will only move as fast as you allow it to move, and this is numbing. Is that enough? No- because the time he remains gone presents itself dauntingly ahead, and each tick of every clock is steady in its predictability, angry in its redundancy. When will it be the right moment to get up, to move on? When will music sound like music again? When will it be time to face another day and will it be right to face it when faced with it?
There's something else to be sure of- existing in the moment now is escape enough from the other world that most exist in whilst also worrying about the past or dreaming about the future, hoping for gains and grieving for loss. The menagerie of life that existed in his lyrics, the places he'd fossilised forever in folk songs, the corners of the world he had heard and given voices all their own- it is up to me, I suppose, to decide to shake his memory off by reducing them to clutterings and rhyming schemes. Or to let his memory go, by letting them continue to live after he'd brought them to life and then ended his own. Let his memory go on, far away enough to feel the future breathing down my neck, but not so far that a sunbeam whistling around a guitar string couldn't be a sound I might consider a reminder of him. How he'd been there, how he is now not there, and how just because he is not right where I am right at this moment in time, he isn't anywhere at all. When I used to listen to his music, it brought me a feeling of potentialities, of possibilities. The songs were unlit candles, unopened envelopes, undrawn curtains, unwoken dreams- wantings and hopings and wishings met with a shower of shooting stars that hadn't yet landed. If I want to live with eyes wide open, thinking of what can be, what might be- all the possible becomings- it isn't because of him. Not anymore. He gave it to me, I found it between the quavers and minims and beats of the music he wrote, it was hidden but only so that those of us who listened could find it. Now he is gone, but just like he can't take the contents of his recording studio, his bedroom, his garage, his attic, he hasn't taken this. I know that it might actually be easier to pretend I'd never known it, and eventually, perhaps, that I'd never known him. To dispose of the remainders of his life, reduce them to trash, crush it- I could crush this thing that haunts me, which is only my memory of him, or the heaviness of the empty space shaped like him that he left behind, the gaping void in me. Yet if choosing this easier option means that I have to return the gift, I'm not sure I want to take it easily. If he wants me to remember, to hurt, to learn the true meaning of bereavement and understand absolutely the feeling of abandonment- well, maybe I don't care what he wants or would have wanted. But I want those things, and I want a life filled with music, with arbitrary and beautiful images evoked by song lyrics, and I want to live believing in ghosts.
If you think hard enough and long enough, a ghost imagined becomes a ghost you can sense right there with you. If quiet and still for long enough, there is music even in silence, and it's just his memory, navigating between the moments in which he is motionless, without mass and without matter, but with so much meaning, because we both put it there.

are you?

chaos

Withering

You picked a dry flower, it threw shimmers like
streaks of unswept summer, dust and pollen collecting
in layers of loving and of lying and
layers of knowing and grief and distance,
when petals turn brown. Eventually the light you captured
will be lost from between your fingers.

I want to build things with you, not watch embers die,
I tell you. You reply, yes I know,
everything decays and someday we will too,
one day our brains and all their interiors
will be dirt in the garden, it will cling to someone’s shoes,
or it will be empty sunbeams whistling in someone’s hair.
I think about the brain, the unfathomable home.
The corners where our desires were lowering,
the windows where our thoughts were blinking,
the doors where our ideas were welcoming,
the staircases where our thoughts were spiralling,
the attics where our memories were greying,
and the basements upon which we founded ourselves.

But even so, even though you are right, even though
one day we will be just another thing,
long withering, but no, more like something
even less than hollow- not even made of matter-
the way we once were, the way we could blossom,
will always matter, won’t it?

Tabula Rasa

INT -- NIGHT -- DELILAH'S LIVING ROOM.

FADE IN- The room is smoky and dimly-lit. Opens with MS of a mobile made of papier mache stars slowly spinning in the foreground while a television flickers behind it, out of focus, blinking with static in between images of a news reader, the sound muted. Camera pans left and we see DELILAH sitting on the floor in front of her sofa, facing the television. An ashtray beside her on the carpet is filled with what look like flower petals. DELILAH is holding a long thin cigarette and a stream of smoke curls up and around her. She idly brings it to and from her mouth. Eventually, expressionless, she looks directly into the camera. Switch to a CU shot of her face, which remains absent of emotion. 

DELILAH (V.0.)

I don’t know where it came from or who grew it. 

He said something like he got it from Mount Olympus.

Obviously, it’s worthless talk, but I’m telling you,

it works, it really works. There are these huge

black holes, empty spaces in my life when I look

back on it. That was a lot of the problem in the 

first place. All the looking back. Getting stuck.

I don’t remember half of it now and my head doesn’t

ache when it rains. Of course, it must be different

for everyone, but it erases the worst thoughts,

no- it makes nothing out of them. Like they never

existed. And I know they did exist, it’s just now

I don’t have to know. I’m telling you. None of us

have to know. We don’t have to be stuck. We can even

hurt one another the way that people inevitably do

and then make it disappear. We can be remade, start 

all over, as if there’s really a time machine. 

We can be elemental. That’s the best part. 

I don’t need memory to keep living anymore. 

Towards the end of the soliloquy, the camera pulls back from her face. The wall behind her comes into focus. There is a piece of paper with handwritten words taped to it. We see the words: ONE DAY THIS WILL ALL MAKE SENSE.

You took the words out of my mouth...

- James Morrison

- Daisy King

Footnotes

This is the beginning of a prose/poetry project I've just started to get my creative writing kick in that hasn't got to do with formatting a screenplay. I'll expand upon it, change what's there maybe, perhaps search for a common thread or theme. But the point of the footnotes is that they are not references to actual quotes, and no words from the sources are directly lifted to use in my writing. The words are my own and inspired by the characters and voices and authors I have referenced thus far. 

It was always the other way round

There are frozen birds in the garden,
trains stranded in the downpour,
flowers missing from the bouquet,
boots left standing by the door.

There are papers soaked on the front step,
well wishes clinging to the trees,
a sort of pleading in every word 'no'
and consent absent in every 'please'.

There's a lady in the curtains.
I told my mother what I had seen. Today I don't remember; it could be true, but it was a strange time, and times got stranger after my father was arrested and the house started to seep with foul smells from heavy-papered walls and every telephone receiver had tears and every letter had teeth. But Maria said she had seen something or someone too, a dead thing, or what wasn't really there. And one night my mother woke up to me sitting on the end of her bed.
Come here, she told me, but then I was gone.

Nobody knows what they are for

The shopping centres turned into greenhouses, trapping light with façades of glass proving conducive to superficial tropical weather, sulking palm trees, even stars that looked grungy, feelings of self-deprecation that lingered like perfume after the weater has left the room, haunting the dressing tables, mirrors with their gilded corners and chipped wallpaper to rest on, the clothing racks. Cars converted to sofas. Nobody even knows what they are for, not when they realised being alone- being away from both people and plants- was a plague and these machines had since become useful only for suffocation or suicide. Metal went soft, as though it could feel the air changing. Finally it felt safe enough to put its guard down. Trees intertwined round traffic lights of all things, putting them to sleep. Trains whistled cradle songs through woodlands, this one sound for miles and miles unless you took into account the muted voices of small children trying to stroke big-eyed bambi or maybe a wolf, their feet heavy, dragging behind the rest in the hunt, itchy cloths around their necks that made them uniform, made them angry, some so angry they tore the legs off spiders. In the grander scheme of things, there had been two millennia and now, as though they have been admonished by someone or something not observable, not measurable, not even will a name to call, in rage or mockery, and without that, there was no way to make the scolding stop stinging. They have now become quiet.

Now it's worth the mess. What a puzzle.