Frühling

Today, spring has appeared with it's usual "well I was here days ago you must have blinked and missed me" vibe.  Full blown blossoms in the street in town, next to Beata Uhse, fittingly already indecently pink.  

There were lambs in the scrubby field next to where I  work, already beyond the cute leggy stage, and the hairy drifts of the silver birch branches swayed with the breeze and the sun shone where today rain was predicted.  

This year, both slower and faster than ever, as the spring begins a third of the year is past, and only a handful of weeks until a large looming birthday for me, and this year I am acutely aware of aging. 

He said, intending to be nice, commenting on an internet picture I'd sent, that my tits weren't as saggy as that, and I thought maybe not the last time you saw them, but it has been a while. I was excited, instead, by kitchen equipment, a new pair of scales and the promise of home baking where I have never wanted to play the home maker with him. 

Age is creeping up on me, even my eyelids droop and fold, I am so practised at veiling my gaze.

Cinderella

In the old days, they wanted me to make then look rich and pretty so they could catch the eye of someone rich, naive and influential.  Simpler times, blonde ambition reached no further than catching their prince and having their dream day in the whitest frilliest of dresses with the envious crowds looking on.
It's easier for them now of course, the thirst for fame is as strong, if not stronger than the hunger for a fairytale wedding.  Easier for me too, even those that still believe in me I send away from my door. 
I am getting too old to be moved by all of those bright eager faces, and besides the fad these days is for self-belief, not belief in magic.  If they don't have that in spades the reality shows will grind them up anyway, just as surely as the days of domestic boredom drove the Cinderellas to become manipulative politicking courtiers.
Now, where's an old woman to get a nice cup of tea from?  I call out to Charlotte, still as ugly as ever, to bring me refreshments and hand me the remote control.  Britain's Got Talent is just starting...

Epithelia

It is like looking at skin, if the skin was magnified and viewed through brick tinted glasses.
It is a boatskin, made of rust and flaky paint; terracotta and pannacotta paint in clotted cream splodges, thick layers on top of each other and the rust crystallising through them.
Water gets under the paint and oxygen works its magic, transmuting the steel into ruddy puff pastry.
Epidermal rust, skin deep and all of the skin, cellular rust, a ferrous bark.
The boat, once an erythrocyte caught in the tidal flow, but now moored up, scabbed and crusted.
Dead but resisting disintegration.

When was that?

I lost that girl somewhere.  She was careless and carefree and reckless and, no, wait, reckfree is not a word; but if it was, she would have been all of that too.  In retrospect yes of course I admired her, loved her even, if only she'd known that.  The turn of her neck, whisking her hair past me, across her eyes, so that I saw her face only in flickers as she smiled, on her way through to somewhere else.  Fleeting, fun and gone.
Stolid and set now, I have taken Scarlett O'Hara's "I'll think about it tomorrow" and hardened into a life of procrastination.

Persistence of memory

A couple of days ago I pasted a status update on facebook and quickly, two responses came, from people I used to work with and with whom I would be more friendly if I lived in the same country.

jkdavies left work 4hrs ago and is still stressed...

• "That's natures way of telling you to open that second bottle of red"
• "Nothing's changed there then? Crack open another and chill!"

And though I hadn't seen either of them for 3+ years, they both correctly predicted I had already managed a nice bottle of red wine and was contemplating the next... 
Was this persistence of memory, were they picturing me the way I was when I last met them? 
Or was it perhaps a persistence of personality, am I now at that age where my thoughts become set and changing my habits is as likely as the wakening of a coma patient?