Without words

The four cornered gulls tumble past, crying and screeching, chasing each other and flirting with the wind. I watch their white speed flashes from my tower window. They sit on lampposts and fight for the best perches.
In the street people noise drifts from under the raucous clamour of the birds.
Chatting.
Shouting.
The piercing beep beep beep of the pedestrian crossing.
“Come on,” a woman says to a child.
The insistent thump of car stereos, never to any tune or rhythm I can pinpoint from up here.
Wind ruffling through the leaves, showing me their silvered underbellies
Multiple people and creatures, clumping together.

The windowpane is cold to my fingertip, I stand back lest I mist it with my breath.

Written as an exercise at the Cardiff Bay Writing Group meeting; write of something (like silence) without using the words for it...

on reflection

there is a space, I look at myself through the glass wall, spattered with evaporated ghosts, memories of water. I am paler and have cat eyes. fingers push into my eyeballs and the world blurs. you were here, once, maybe once more. is that really me, with the steady returning gaze? the unsteady memories?

madness?

I talk to you
when you are
not there

this is called
writing

the edge

Being at the beach should be one of the simple pleasures in life. The best sort of beach has shelving sand dropping steeply into the sea, the waves rush up and tug at your ankles as you try to walk along. Standing still in the swirl of the sand and water results in your feet being buried up to your ankles, deeper each time the surf surges in. The icing on the cake is the rocky outcrops that make the perfect beach, so that the waves crash and send pearled and diamonded droplets into the sky. Spume. And over and over the waves come, in a rhythmn that never gets boring.

The joy of being on the edge, between the elements of earth and water, land and sea is what makes it more complex. I am most at home in the limbo between them, on the beach when the waves crash. Some people are happy at the centre of things, I am an edge person, happier looking in and observing.

The land is a mass where humans live, millions and millions of them, whom I will never know. The humans I meet, talk to, write to, watch on the telly or in films, they belong to this mass. I do not know them, in a Venn diagram of all that we have in common, the two circles barely kiss. I do not feel encompassed by them, I feel a thing apart, I prefer to watch them and carefully pick my interactions.

I feel drawn to the water and its vastness and energy and seeming emptiness (ignoring the scientist part of me that knows the biomass of the oceans is greater than that of the land). I feel drawn to it, I would like to wade into it's depths and swim out away from the shore, I would like to be that bold and adventurous, but I am not. If I stay here long enough, thinking, watching, reflecting, perhaps I will get the strength?

The beach is where land and sea come to interact, where sociability flirts with the empty wet horizon. An edge person needs the land, the mass, as well as the waters that move to their own tides. And so I come to the beach, not such a simple pleasure.



originally inspired by a T10 prompt 3rd June 2010, revised for >language>place blog carnival edition #6 on 21st May 2011 after the world did not end again.

A good day to bury bad news

The duvet lay straggled somewhere across the top of her thighs, one of them had made an attempt to cover up after the last bout of sex. He lay spooned behind her, his arm cradled under her breasts, hers resting over his. She felt cherished, again.

The first time it had stunned her, to lie with him in between the breathless explorations, to simply lie in his arms and be cared for. The heady rush of sex with someone she trusted, someone she wanted to please and oh, she was so thrilled that he seemed to be pleased by her. The cocktail of chatting all day about minutiae, of flirting and teasing, the feeling that she could say anything to him, and vice versa had opened her heart. The way to a mans heart may be through his stomach, but he had reached hers from between her legs.

Waking slowly, later in the morning, dazed with lack of sleep and still a bit drunk, there was a knock at the door. The maid, she supposed.

He yawned and stretched, "What time is it?"

"Nearly half ten," she said, reading it off her phone by the bed. One new message. No harm in looking at it, she supposed; as he got up to go to the bathroom she clicked into it, an anonymous number? The trickling noise as he pissed into the toilet seemed to go on forever as she read the message, when he came back into the room she was sitting up with the phone at arms length like she had never seen it before in her life.

"The message is for you," she said, and pulled the duvet up around her in a protective cocoon.

He read the message, "Tell that husband of mine I have news for him"


Posted at ThinkingTen in response to the Word inc Wednesday challenge:  news, spoon
http://thinkingten.ning.com/profiles/blogs/a-good-day-to-bury-bad-news

Remote

Sometimes I wonder who I am chatting to really when I message or e-mail him, physically all I can see are the words we send to each other as we have the electronic conversation; it's attenuated nature is not immediately obvious as my mind fills in the gaps of a missing voice and tone, face and body, shared and separated histories.
The words jump from the screen direct to the brain, and I interpret the simple facts of the communication with him, decorating them with the smiles and laughter, touches and tears that we used to share; although sometimes the words carry out a bypass operation and head direct to my stomach.
I type at my keyboard picturing him at his, concentrating on what I have said, and choosing the words to send back to me; I tease my words into a shape I know will tease him, but not too much, the situation demands that I hold something of myself back until he changes his mind and comes to be with me again.
I use the words to bring, bit by bit, the desired result closer, subtle reminders of what he is missing, some not so subtle remarks as to what I miss, I am playful as I build up an edifice of memory and longing and closeness; looking to evoke a yearning nostalgia that can be uncorked to fizz and be joyful again.
He writes "Talking to you makes me have thoughts, but whereas before I would let those thoughts lead me they don’t now!" and my gut curdles as I digest the realisation that thinking about me has lost the power to move him the way it used to.
And with that I realise, the words I see from him are filled with a backwash of emotions that I provided for myself; he sees just my words.