Things That Went Unspoken; What They Wished They Had Said; What Should Have Been Said

"I would be happy doing anything with you."

"You remind me of thoughts I've unintentionally left behind."

"Keep breaking your heart until it opens."

"If I could take away your insecurities, I would, but I can't so for now, I'll love you enough for the both of us."

"Don't ever go."

"You need to learn how to care, that's the problem."

"There are people, and then there is you."

"You make me think, even just for a second, that I can do anything."

"Will you please get the fuck out of my head, thank you."

"I've never found the words to say what I mean, and body language fails me- you will never know."

"No, I don't think about you anymore, but I don't think about you any less."

"I really hope someday you find someone to help and heal you, but it's not going to be me."

"I'm not worthless, I'm afraid you are just feeble-minded."

"Please don't look at me like that, because I will fall apart if I see you cry."

"Please don't ask this of me, because I know I am going to hurt you."

"You're braver than people give you credit for, but you're brave enough not to need that credibility."

"I thought I was her."

"If I loved you, I should have let you go."

"I'm scared, every day, all the time. Please tell me the truth, if you ever feel that way."

"I'm the word your lips forgot."

"Happen, with me."

(Footnote- these are from fictional sources, some drawn from personal experience but none are actually personal.)

Other Lives (Reincarnation Imagined)

TRANSCRIPT:

I don't know if I can tell you this: that there's something sinister waiting to happen. It's a rattlesnake beneath the floorboards type of feeling. A falling to your death just before you wake up because you've been dreaming type of feeling.

Do you believe in past lives because I never have, but if I did, I'd like to make them up for myself the way I make up the meaning of this whole universe, just because I know there isn't going to be a big reveal at the end or at any point, and nobody is going to let me in on the secret.

In one past life, I'm sitting on a porch and the evening is humid, I'm looking out over a creek, hearing but not listening to a cacophony of crickets and insects' monotonous drone, and splashing. I think I'm somewhere in the dustbowl I've read about in all the books about the American Dream. Or the shattering of that Dream. Or the illusion of that Dream. Or a dream of a Dream. But in this dream, or past life, there are two boys throwing punches at each other and they are in the water.
On one side of the creek, there's a pile of clothes. I know that there's a pistol hidden in it. On the other side of the creek, there's only warm darkness, hot night.

Another life now. I am a we. There's a you and a me, but he isn't my you and I can't be his me, or her- we are just somebodys. We are trying to find out what our insides look like using only words. His handwriting is messy, messier than mine is in this life. I mistake his scribbled hearts for small butterflies tacked to the end of a message he penned in a card. Anniversary. Valentines. Birthday.
It's another life. A harvest moon means something in this life. A heartbeat like an insect hitting the window pane. Again. Again. Again.

I'm in a car taking a moonlit drive with Jim Morisson. He's feeding me pieces of heaven. We are midnight heroes. This is another life entirely. But he bites his fingernails, and above his bed is a ceiling fan that whines like a dog in pain, and I hate myself in this life.
The mornings are ugly and my lips look like something I've fallen on. I am cold all the time. I am not introspective, and I do not know why I want to end my life, but I do, so it doesn't last long.

Next life, I chew the inside of my cheek when I am angry or nervous, or both, which is often, and in this life a man is yelling at me in Japanese but I know what he is telling me- you are not worthy. I want to tell him- yes I am- but I do not lift my eyes.
I think I made a long life in Japan but never spoke back. It wasn't the right time, not the right life. But this one, this could be the one.

I'm missing three fingers. I'm probably going to lose half of my nose. My skin is turning to the colour of chrome, it glows amongst all the white. I'm at the top of the world. I made it to the top of the highest mountain in the world.
We may not make it back down alive, but we got here, and this is a feeling I want to package, to put away in a bottle or small box and bring back with me to this real life.

But that was another life, that never happened, forever ago, never ago, and there were many and there were none and I was so special in some and so insignificant in others. See- it doesn't really matter. You can say it's a dream- you can take that pistol out and shoot a bird, you can let the warm dark swallow you, you can put your hands into his chest, you can take your last breath in a dimly lit bathroom, you can say nothing, you can say everything, you can be brilliant, or you can be worthless, but in the end it means exactly the same thing.

It's all gone to the dogs

Glimmering and pale on the storefronts that were now just litter and tattered signs, everything must go un-spelled in shredded ribbons, rust-clatter cages pulled down over them. It was as if a long rain had come and washed all their insides away but the shells remained, which made it more miserable to drive past if you couldn't avoid it- there were promises there, not quite broken yet without a doubt never to be realised, because nobody cared enough to kill it all off, for certain. They could have brought it all crumbling down. They could have swung a wrecking ball at every building and roof until not a single brick was left standing upright. A pile of dirt would have been more settling. But the ambiguity that hung over those forgotten places left it sickly and unfinished. Groups of anonymous drifters in hooded sweatshirts huddled over crack pipes in the alley between what used to be a dry cleaner and a once-whitewashed estate agent's office. At night, the darkness disappears down the drains and into the sewers. The air forgets that it's made of oxygen. They say a girl was cycling down that road one March midnight and dropped dead. The coroner said the cause of death was drowning.

There was another death by drowning a couple of months later. Mr Rubens was taking his dogs for a run in the chilly mist of dawn, under a sky so silver-white with cloud cover there was no evidence of the sun having risen at all, except for the lights that were beginning to flicker on in the windows of nearby houses, the sound of car engines starting as commuters pulled out of driveways, and the birds. You could always tell by the birds. He thought it was a swan at first, or a bird at least, with white feathers. When he trod down the reeds by the water and got closer to what one of his dogs had dragged from the shallows with its teeth, he saw it wasn't a bird at all. It wasn't even an animal. It was a woman's nightgown, dirty, sodden. Mr Rubens' head frantically whipped from one side to the other, he thought about yelling but the thought was fleeting and a silly one anyway. He walked his dogs down to the police station and told them what the hounds had sniffed out. The area was taped up in yellow for a few days but the barriers were cut before the week was through. No evidence left behind. No body. No crime. 

//

Thoughts in dream textures. 

Too scared to write anything down.

Nothing is obedient enough.

Fluttering - breathing - praying -

I watch my eyes change colour like the sky, from black to blue to purple to pink again. 

Staircases looming towards me. Walls falling into me. I crack against them. 

I crack and I heal, which means there's some power left in me.

While he sleeps I daren't close my eyes, but for a moment I do, and I do not see the non-colour of my eyelides. I see a field, I see water, I see weeds gently moved by the swell of the stream, and mud, sinking sands, and sky, stretching farther than this world. Another place, another pathway. I see another person, she's running. In another time, another space, she could be standing in the shallow surf of the sea. Perhaps the planet is an entirely different one. Wherever she is, she's unreachable. The waves crash around her, blossoming and booming. They whisper. She can feel the water when she stretches out her hand, right there, where the bedsheets should be. A small gasp of air is drawn from her lungs- 

in that second, she decides to become a ghost.

//

One house was abandoned, without warning, the same week the dogs found the nightgown. There was no reason to believe the finding and the disappearance of the inhabitants were connected. There was nothing untrustworthy about them. The head of the police department knew the man of the house from years ago, when they were both on the police force, but marriage, his colleage had said, changed everything. He said he didn't want to carry a gun anymore. He said he wanted to keep his wife safe, make sure she never had reason to fear for her safety and want to move elsewhere, want to leave. He left out the part where he ought to have added 'with or without him' but they were old friends, they'd been cadets together, they drank beers at the local brewery most nights, they went to the run-down, unpeopled strip club once in a while, where the music was melancholy and the drinks were flat, but that's not why they went. They stumbled home, parted ways, with a lot of back-thumps and hollered praises. When his friend had disappeared, the head of police knocked on the door, looked in the windows, but didn't stay long. He'd look him up in the pages, figure it out, when he had the time. There was too much to deal with right now- drugs being sold in the old part of town that used to be all yellow and blue and pink, sunny, uncluttered, and glossed-over, like it was all new and for sale. A long time ago. It didn't take him long to stop wondering about the sudden disappearance of the couple in that house. Maybe they'd just moved, maybe she had felt unsafe, and had reason to now the town was falling apart. Maybe they'd gone on a trip. Maybe someone's relative was sick. There were so many assumptions, so many dead ends, and he was too busy to find answers, and it wasn't his business anyway. He was watching the sky from his bed the same night he'd checked the house, watching the moon swinging amongst the drooping clouds. He had a fleeting conviction, all of a sudden, that he hadn't checked the back windows. He hadn't gone through the gate in the fence and into the yard to check the back of the house. And he wasn't going to. He steeled himself to sleep, thinking soporific thoughts of the cigarettes he'd like to smoke, the women he'd like to see in that slip of a nightgown, standing there in the moonlight, and the summer that existed, surely, just out of sight. Things must be easier to forget than they are to remember. Surely he could let the heaviness in his chest and stomach slip away by just forgetting the thought, forgetting where it had come from, retracing his steps backwards. In his dream, he walked through the fence and saw the back bathroom window was broken, stained with blood, and strips of pale fabric, the same ribbons of satin that had been missing from that dirty nightdress, were clinging to the edges of the glass, gently murmuring in the wind.

Train Song

My Evil Genius Split Brain: Read More

Spreading the word about transient experiences of psychosis and how you can come out of them without a life-long and monumentally detrimental diagnosis of schziophrenia or psychotic spectrum disorder...

Read More

People Think/I Think

People think that someone must pay.
I think that thinking that way is only your own loss.
People think that they are entitled to respect.
I think I am not entitled to anything, least of all respect, for there is nothing to respect about me.
People think what goes around comes around.
I think that sometimes it doesn't.
People think that they are not able to make much of a difference.
I think that people can make a lot of difference if they try hard enough and for long enough.
People think that others will have the same responses, inclinations and perceptions as they do.
I think that the most interesting thing about life is the vast diversity in the way people think.
People think that money means success.
I think that money makes people proud and that makes them ugly.
People think honesty is the best policy.
I think you can still be polite and civil to someone, even if you honestly dislike them.
People think that their childhoods inform their futures.
I think that our childhoods can inform our present and future as much as we believe they will, and allow them to.
People think that things will only be okay if there is a resolution or closure.
I think that sometimes you have to be okay without any resolution, and closure is a myth.
People think that your home reflects your inner state of being.
I think they are right but that neatness and order are not indicative of a better or superior state of being.
People think that the appearance of effortlessness is charming and attractive.
I think that people who appear to put in effort and to be trying are the most attractive.
People think that Nietzsche was a depressive nihilist who saw no meaning to life.
I think that he was a hopeless realist who didn't believe in an absolute meaning, but who thought that if there were to be one, finding it would be the end of us existing.
People think that they matter.
I think that they matter so much more and in ways they don't even know.
People think that there's some meaning of life that's in question.
I think that it's a question of what you decide it's going to mean to you, because nobody will ever tell you so you may as well make it up.
People think the best way forward is always following a path or climbing a ladder
I think that I'll always be looking up to people on those ladders or at people far ahead on their paths, but will not go in either of those directions- I'm just here, looking at life as it is now, wandering, sometimes in circles, sometimes between places, sometimes to new territories, and while I'm looking at everything as it is now, I know that it will all look so different in a while, or just a little while, or any moment at all.
People think that forgiving is condoning and forgetting is letting go of something worth holding tight to.
I think that forgiving is freedom and forgiving is letting go of what gets heavier the longer you carry it around with you, and that you should not forget, because you can only learn from what you remember.

Why did you desert me?

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.