A contribution to this week’s Writing Workshop, by David.

Second

@theghostshirt

The mist swirled at the break of dawn.  Somewhere, beyond the veil cast by the trees around the clearing, a cockerel crowed once, then a second time, chest puffed out, its wattle vibrating like a red warning on this, the most final of days….for someone.

How it had come to this was truly beyond me, but here I was, ready to ensure an outcome.

The looks between them bred their own kind of venom.  Like vipers cursing each other at the apothecaries store as they were milked for their poison.  And oh, what an apothecary she was!  Tall and brunette, with fire in her hips and that light taste of pomegranate on her lips, she was to be worshiped.  And now was the reckoning.  One snake would coil forever at her feet.  One snake to lick her soft flesh with a forked tongue of her making.

The cockerel crowed once more.

I held up the pistol box and slowly opened its lid.  My friend, my comrade, my brother in arms, he didn’t look at me.  His gaze was on the fine barrelled pistol, weighted and crafted for his hand.  It lay nestled in the box’s velvet lining, one single leaden shot already loaded.  With my counterpart, the other second, I had already checked the twin pistol.  It was being displayed now, mere yards from us on the other side of the clearing.  It was like a fantasy mirror before us blighted with stupidity and male pride.  A pistol in an identical box, one with an identical pearl handle, crafted by the same gunsmith that had made arms for their family for decades

The glove, that modern day gauntlet, it had been thrown down last week.  At the end of a long night of chase and counter chase.  The dancing had been sublime and the costumes fanciful and pearl studied, with crinoline and lace, enough to entrap the most pious of priest.  My friend and his brother had been alive to the drama of their sibling rivalry, like two cuckoos forced to share the same nest.  She had smiled.  Thin lips, wandering eyes and that whiplash of a smile, blinding them both with its star crossed sting, dazzling enough for all our eyes.

The hammer cocked, and with steely determination he trod the yards to meet the approach of his brother, for this, the most secret of duels.

The pact had been solemnly made.  Nobody, bar those present would know the identity of the victor.  To slay your own blood is taboo.  It was agreed, when the protocol of the duel was decided, that the vanquisher would lead their life without any stain on their name.  The dead would take their killers name to the grave and as seconds, officers and gentlemen our silence was beyond question.

No matter their history and blood ties, the duellists were strangers now.  Strangers ready to end one another’s lives in a ritual of aristocratic folly.   They met.  Eyes empty and hollow, as if brotherhood no longer existed except as a martyr for personal honour.   They were soldiers and death was now their only fraternal calling.

‘Turn.  Back to back. Then on my word, advance, 5 paces gentleman,’ the other second cried.

Such was the wrath that they felt for one another, that an easy ten paces was the agreed distance, one pace for every five years of their lives.  They both knew it was a short, and certain to produce a victor.

Back to back.

They started as they had been in the womb together, when one would be first born, my friend, the stronger, the other, born second the weaker but more cunning.  Their birth, after hours of labour and subsequent septicaemia, had almost killed their mother.  The medical men had saved her life, but not her womb.  They were the last of the line.

‘Advance!’

First pace.

When they were five they had fallen ill together.  Scarlet fever had struck them both, they had been lucky to survive.  Their fevers had burned, and then broken, each at the same time.  The doctors had been amazed, their father overjoyed.  To lose both sons would have meant no succession.  My friend, first born, he would inherit, the second born, he was merely the safe guard.

Second pace.

Aged ten their mother died in a tragic accident.  It had been the boy’s first true glimpse of death.   The Reaper’s hand had turned slowly into a fist, to grab and shake them both with a sense of their own mortality.   Perhaps it was then that the true rivalry began.  One day their father would die, and only one would inherit.

Third pace.

Aged fifteen they had fought one another for the first time.  My friend was the victor but only by the slimmest of margins and it was he who carried the scar above his eye as reminder of his brother’s fury.  The rock had almost cost him his sight.  The drawing of that first blood had fuelled their rivalry for years to come.

Fourth pace.

Aged twenty, and then came the parting of ways.  My friend took to the horse and the charge of the cavalry.  His brother sought out the sea as a Captain in the making.  Every conquest and battle was merely a further tale of heroism, each trying to outshine the other son.

Fifth pace.

When they were twenty five they had met her, the apothecary.  Both were smitten.  But the Captain won out.  In secret he proposed, before he left for a ten month voyage.  She accepted.

Oh, but she played them well.  My friend she’d married whilst his brother was at sea.  She loved the lure of his wealth more than him.  And so, the Captain’s homecoming had been a stormy affair.  Home to the discovery of his brother’s prize…the woman he loved.  The duel would right this wrong.  His brother dead she would be his, his brother dead he would also inherit.

‘Turn,’ the voice called out.

Neither knew about the life that stirred inside the apothecary’s womb, her belly just beginning to swell with the presence of an unborn.  She knew well that she was with child, as did I.  She would produce an heir, who would stand, one day to inherit a fortune, with both land and title.  Blood will out, but succession can easily be controlled by those who seek to manipulate such things.  She knew her frail father-in-law would not last long, not after the death of his precious son.

Two pistols were raised.

‘Fire!’

Two shots blasted out.

My friend slumped.  His knees buckled.  Crumpled he lay by my feet, life seeping away through the gaping wound to his head.  It seemed odd to look down at him dying so rapidly.  We had fought side by side so often, and he had always seemed, like me, beyond harm.  Indeed we looked slightly alike and could have passed for brothers.  For a fleeting moment I caught sight of my own death, prostrate at my feet.

His twin brother, the Captain, he stood unharmed.   His arms fell to hang by his side, limp and helpless.  The enormity of his deed had finally struck him.  As the look of anguish passed across his tortured face the third shot blasted out.

My pistol smoked in my hand.  I didn’t miss.  The ball of lead ripped into the Captain’s heart and he fell backwards to the ground, dead.

Two gentlemen’s corpses, lying in a cold clearing, sometime after dawn, ten paces apart, duelling pistols in hand and two fatal wounds.  Such evidence spoke for itself.  It was a tragic outcome, no victor, simply two dead duellists and a faint sense that honour had somehow been restored, no suspicion on anyone else.

From somewhere through the veil of trees she came slowly, a bag of gold coins in one hand and a smile on her lips.  The apothecary approached the other second and passed him the velvet bag containing his price.  The cockerel crowed once again as he slipped away through the veil of trees.

The two brothers lay dead, ten paces apart.  She didn’t give her dead fiancé as much as a second glance.  She crossed the recently trodden ground.  Ten paces; then passed the body of her dead husband.  She walked toward me, my child in her womb and the sweet taste of pomegranate on her lips.

With forked tongue I kissed the back of her hand and coiled myself around her feet.

For my writing workshop this week, I set the prompt ‘second’, and I thought that today I would share with you an except of the second chapter of a story that I’ve started working on again, after putting it down for a while. There seems to be a fair bit of interest in my writing at the moment which I need to make the most of, so I’m hoping to get this good enough for submission this year, if I can. 

I’m not going to tell you as single thing about what it’s about, what came before or what might come after and it’s just a first draft, but  I hope you enjoy it. 

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“I slept then, deep. No memory, even, of finding a seat, only the repetitive lull of the train bending its way through the miles as I was pulled under.

I did not dream. I slept the sleep of something dead with no capacity left to rearrange fractured thoughts into pictures, if that is what dreaming is, I have never been sure. Although, actually, no, I did not feel dead, numb as I was. Perhaps, the sleep I slept was more like that of something brand-new, without yet sensory impressions to give shape to those fleeting cognitive flashes. Yes, it was more like that.

I woke to the feeling of being shaken, and wondered, briefly, confused, if perhaps I had passed out on the station platform after all, and whether everything that had come after it had been the dream, that perhaps I would come round to find myself still sitting there, still with that choice to make. But no: my nose working quicker than my brain, and the smell of upholstery and coffee and the stale, air conditioned air that comes with many shared hours in a train carriage with a few dozen strangers, quickly convinced me otherwise, and I looked up into the oval, white-downed face of the ticket officer as he roused me to state we had reached my destination, and that the train service was terminating here.

Here. I was here. Christ, had a slept that long?

My bones ached, like they had been shaken to the point of breaking, or perhaps squashed together in some tight, restrictive place, and only just unfolding and knitting together for the first time. Maybe both were true. I was trembling as I stood, pulling my bag out from under the seat, stumbling against the edges of the seats in the aisle as I made my way toward the exit as if the train were still moving. The vague concerns of the ticket inspector followed me as I lurched and recovered on my newly purposeful legs. No, no I was fine. I didn’t need to sit down, or for him to call anyone – I vaguely flapped one arm reassuringly as I used the other to steer myself, turning my head to smile, only to trip once more. It occurred to me that he probably thought I was drunk, and that made me laugh, an irrepressibly girlish giggle that burst from my mouth like a dropped bell. I had not heard that sound in a long time, and it seemed so wildly inappropriate in the circumstances that it made my face flush, fingers covering my mouth in an attempt to stuff it back in.

After what felt like an age, I was there, the hungry mouth of the train that had swallowed me just a doorway once again as I stepped down and over the gap to the hard concrete platform, reassuringly stable and firm through my thin pumps. I had a sudden urge to kick them off and feel the rough coldness on my soles, just to convince myself I really was here, but the owl-like ticket officer, his head bobbing up and down in curiosity and mild alarm, was hovering in the doorway. I suspected taking off my shoes might be the final push that made him pick up the walkietalkie at his belt and squawk a call to the police. And I couldn’t have that, god no.

I gave him what I hoped was another confident smile, my teeth and lips seemingly clambering over one another in an over-eager bid to display my sunny togetherness. God, I must have looked insane. But it was too late: look, I was walking! I was walking away, down the long platform, my legs more confident already, the sounds of the Tannoy system and the engines of cooling trains echoing and vibrating in my ears.

I felt my head lift and my back straighten, knots of tension and held emotion falling away from me like an unravelling jumper as I walked. I felt good. I couldn’t believe how good I felt! Was this what adrenaline did? Or shock? Or was this more than chemical courage? Was this simply freedom? Is this what freedom felt like? Fuck it, I didn’t care. I was here. I had done it.

As was my habit, my eyes started to pull upwards as I walked. They always seem to do that, to pull down or up but rarely look straight ahead, as determined as any persistent squint. I often wondered why I did it, and, as far as I could remember, always had. But as my gaze met the thick stripes of molten sunshine stretching from between beams, heavy with motes that hung and shimmered, I remembered that feeling of new worlds above and below me as I walked as a child, worlds that everyone else with their straight-ahead focus seemed to miss: a mass of discarded, plastic wiring heavy with dew under the hawthorn bush on the walk to school, like stars in some tiny microcosm of the universe; the horse-head gutter outlet, high in the dim overhang of my Grandmother’s blue house, dirty water gushing from its open, screaming mouth… oh there was so much light here, so much life.

With my bag heavy on my shoulder, I let myself be pulled into the heaving tide of the station concourse, stumbling to avoid suitcases, and groups of hesitating tourists with anxious tour guides. Shuffling in-bred pigeons hobbled on their stunted, raggedy feet between the ironed legs of men in suits, and waiting teenagers, and an endless stream of beautiful, purposeful people wearing confidence like cheap perfume. The air smelt of burgers and sweat and toilets and coffee, and it was quite possibly the most wonderful thing I had ever laid my eyes on.

Overhead, time hung, suspended in a cubic clock, an upsidedown face with moustached-hands pointing to the ten and two. Its eyeless countenance dripped with bird shit tears as it laughed and turned and clacked its tongue at the shifting mass below it and the insistence of this place to count the hours and minutes, as if they actually meant anything at all. And I stopped and I stood and I laughed too, until people started to stare and I remembered where I was and that I had better keep moving.”

- an extract from Untitled, by Josie George

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Now it’s your turn. Show me your writing on the theme of ‘second’.

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the Linky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) – it’ll be open til Sunday night so if you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve got plenty of time to join in. Don’t forget that anyone can take part! New prompts will be up this time next week, so I hope to see you back soon.

Hello there. Part of the reason this blog exists is to encourage my own and others’ writing and in all my distraction getting stuck into my art degree last year I managed to forget that a little. I feel strangely guilty, like the blog’s lost its way a little, and that’s no good.

So, *best commitment face*, let’s get back to it. New writing prompts every other Monday, with a chance to share your work on the Monday in between. It turns out 2012 is going to be unexpectedly full of writing for me and I’m going to really need the practice – I figure I might as well take you along for the ride. And for any of you that started the new year pledging to do more creative writing, or for those that just enjoy the excuse, hopefully our fortnightly prompts will give you a focus and a reason to sit down and try something new. You don’t need to be a writer, or even consider yourself any good. It can be a couple of hundred words or a longer piece – the important thing is just to have a go.

For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, you can have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.

Prompt

 I wrote about January at the weekend and how the first month of the year is often my wash-out month, my false start, so with us moving into a more optimistic second month I thought that could be our prompt this week – second.

Write about a second something, a second anything. Does it come with the disappointment of not being a first? Or is second somehow better, without the pressure and expectation that comes with a first something?  Write about yourself, an experience, something in your life, or in your past, write descriptive prose or poetry, or, (and I’d really like to see some more fiction on here), dream up a story with ‘second’ as the theme. It’s absolutely up to you how you interpret it.

Now…

Decide how you’d like to respond, write your post and publish it on your blog between now and NEXT MONDAY. On Monday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then, if you can, take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comments. We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind and encouraging please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Monday’s round-up. And, of course, if blogging isn’t your thing, you could always use the prompts for private, off-line writing too.

Enjoy!

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Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason.

She sat in front of two jam jars, one smelling faintly of pickled onions and the other so old she couldn’t even remember what had been in it. With looped lines she wrote two labels and stuck them on, one on each: Missing and Found. And then she sat with the pen in the end of her mouth and thought hard.

With a sigh, it was easy to write the first one, her hand moving to fetch a slip of paper she had cut, writing in careful, neat capital letters, folding the paper to drop it into the Missing jar. Best to get that one out the way, and no need to dwell, was there really. Those thoughts had been thought before. She could bury it under other things missing, to help forget about it for a while. And after all, she doubted that particular aspect of her life would be missing for that long. “You’re just in there temporarily, okay?” she said aloud, reaching for another slip of paper. Right, what else was missing? She prodded the word in her head, but found it unbudging. Words sometimes like to take on the character of resistant old toads, she had found, so she shrugged, fair enough, we’ll come back to that one then.

Letting her mind wander in the hope she might be able to sneak up on her word and surprise it into croaking out some coherent thoughts before it realised, her eyes came to rest on the day’s detritus, dinosaurs mixed with pirates tumbled with Transformers,  who had all spent the day in the determined grasp of little hands manoeuvring them in complicated adventures. And she smiled and wrote her favourite name in the world in expressive letters, as befitted its owner, dropping it into the Found jar. The feel of the pen in her hands reminded her of another, and so ART came next, and that felt good as that was a word that had spent long years pushed away, for fear of mistakes and failure and goodness knows what else. And hell, yes, that meant PHOTOGRAPHY, too, and WRITING and MAKING, and BOOKS, and TREASURE HUNTING, and BEING BOLD and BEAUTIFUL THINGS all the other things she’d found new joy for over the last year or so. She wrote them all out and dropped them one by one in the jar. God, they were coming thick and fast now; new friends, happy parents and brother, blog, twitter… She paused before writing out, COMFORTABLE IN MY OWN SKIN, with a (nearly) added, just for honesty’s sake. PURPOSE, yes, that was something found too. Gosh, yes, that one had spent long years as property of the old toad, it felt good to liberate that one.

She stopped. Wow, that jar filled up quick. Time to prod the other word again. Missing. Hmm. Missing missing missing. She wrote out, THE RIGHT HOME, and paused with her fingers over the Missing jar. No wait, that was stupid. She had a house, and okay, she didn’t own it, and it was small and cramped, without fancy stuff and not in the nicest of areas, but it was cheap and homely and slowly feeling like an extension of her own skin, filled with simple things that made her happy. With a decisive nod she moved her hand to drop the piece of paper in the Found jar. Likewise, BETTER HEALTH made her stop. Her wrists ached and she could feel her hips beginning to seize after a busy day, it would be easy to drop that one into the Missing jar. But the truth was she was healthier than she’d been since she was probably 8 years old. She had found ‘better’ – so that should go in Found too. MORE MONEY she ripped up altogether. Even GRANDMA she couldn’t bring herself to put in the Missing jar. Leave her her rest, she thought. She’d found peace, and deserved to sit amongst good things, so into the Found jar she went too.

And with that she sat back and looked at her jars, the folded squares of paper overflowing from one, the other empty but for a single square. The desire to rack her brains for more things to add to that one had completely left her. If there were any others they probably weren’t all that important anyway.

She slowly peeled off the label, adding a temporarily above the Missing before sticking it back on.

She smiled.

Life was good.

__________________________________________

Now it’s your turn. Tell me what you are missing?

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the Linky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) – it’ll be open til Sunday night so if you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve got plenty of time to join in. Don’t forget that anyone can take part! New prompts will be up this time next week, so I hope to see you back soon.

I wrote a post on Sunday that seems to have touched a nerve a bit. And not just with single people, it seems, which just goes to show that a sense of missing something is something a lot of us have hanging over us sometimes.

So I thought maybe that’s what we could write about this week.

(For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.)

Prompt

This week the theme is simply missing.

You can interpret this however you like. What is leaving a bit of a hole in your life at the moment? What do you feel is missing? How long have you been carrying this around and what do you think will fix it? Can it be fixed? Is it something emotional, physical, material? Can you even pin it down?

Don’t limit yourself to personal writing if you don’t want to – you could try creating an imaginary character to explore the theme, or write MISSING on a big sheet of paper, seeing what associations it brings, scribbling them down and then writing more on one of the things the word conjures up for you.

Now…

Decide how you’d like to respond, write your post and publish it on your blog between now and NEXT MONDAY. On Monday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then, if you can, take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comments. We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Monday’s round-up. And, of course, if blogging isn’t your thing, you could always use the prompts for private, off-line writing too.

Enjoy!

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Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason.

I am a natural collector, a hoarder of treasures. Not things that usually cost much, thankfully, but buttons and old keys and things I find on the pavement. I can’t walk past conkers without picking them up, or especially vibrant leaves, or pebbles or snail shells – my pockets are always full, the top of my piano always a shrine to my wanderings about. Mostly I love things that look like they have a story.

With my space to myself I’m becoming a braver collector.  I dream of shelves of mis-matched tea cups, walls full of old frames with nothing in them, glass jars filled to the top with whatever I’ve thought to put in them. I want to fill my house with stories.

But if I could collect anything, if such things were possible, I would collect glances.

You know, those brief looks that people throw when they think no-one is looking. Each one a whole story in itself. And in a way, I do collect them. I watch for them and my little internal camera goes click. Some are slow and dawdling, others move so fast you would miss them to blink. You see them in the eyes of people gazing out their car windows in long queues of traffic, some vacant, lost somewhere else far away, fingers idly tapping on the steering wheels, others riddled with frowns and frustration with clenched grips at lateness and deadlines and don’t get so close, will you? You catch one in the sudden confused pause of a woman in the supermarket as she tries to remember what on earth she came in for. Another caught as a girl walks along the pavement with her arms folded around her thin chest, eyes to the floor, earphones plugged in when suddenly her eyes lift to the sky, in sudden response to the surge of a song or the line of a lyric as she flashes a smile, her whole face changing.

There’s a limitless number to collect, enough to set any keen collector’s heart racing. The mother at the nursery door with tired eyes turns to watch her young son bound off to his friends with that unique working mother mixture of guilt and concern and utter relief. The teenager waiting at the traffic lights with her giggling tribe, looking sideways at her best friend suddenly with momentary jealousy and spite. Even the occasional double-glance of a man walking past, as something primal, that automaton part of us ruled by something other than brains, makes his eye suddenly dart to look at me again.

I want to collect them all, gather them up from where they are thrown, and pin them all over my walls, moving them around like jigsaw puzzles to reveal patterns of people’s dreams and wants and thoughts. I want to scratch at them to reveal colours underneath. What is it that made that man’s face twist in anger just then as he walks alongside his wife? What happened to the woman who, with a wary, pained glance, steers in an arc to avoid having to come too close or look too closely at the baby in the pushchair coming in the opposite direction? What made that girl look away from her reflection in the shop window with something like fear?

I want to fill books with their stories, stick them down like stamps.

Maybe I shall.

__________________________________________

Now it’s your turn. Tell me about your collections, real or imagined

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the Linky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) – it’ll be open til Sunday night so if you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve got plenty of time to join in. Don’t forget that anyone can take part! New prompts will be up this time next week, so I hope to see you back soon.

I know, late again. My unpredictable timekeeping makes me interesting and enigmatic though, right? Definitely NOT annoying? You can blame the Fibro for Monday’s lateness (Josie swallowed by a post-MADS black hole, urgh) and THIS for yesterday’s (SO EXCITED) but look, I’m here I’m here!

So then. What are we going to be writing about this week?

(For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.)

Prompt

This week I want to hear about your collections. (no prizes for guessing where that idea came from)

Tell me about what you hoard, what you collect. Describe it to us, what is it about the things you collect that you love and that draws you to them? Tell us stories behind the things you’ve collected. Where did they come from? Do you know their history? Describe one item, or five, or ten, or whatever you want. What would you collect if you had the spare cash? 

Now…

Decide how you’d like to respond, write your post and publish it on your blog between now and NEXT MONDAY. On Monday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then, if you can, take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comments. We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Monday’s round-up. And, of course, if blogging isn’t your thing, you could always use the prompts for private, off-line writing too.

Enjoy!

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Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason.

For as long as I can remember, my life has been about too fast or too slow. On the way to nursery this morning, my boy sped along the lines in the pavement, dragging me by my hand. Fast, fast! he’d shout. And I laughed and we raced and declared ourselves winners. And that’s me, that is. Fast.  I am most definitely the pretend horse galloping under cold sunshine, and the runaway train that’s going to catch us, mama! FASTER! I have always been a million miles an hour girl. It makes me skip and trip over my own feet. My head moves faster than I can keep up with sometimes. Mental energy is something that runs out of my ears like too-small hands trying to carry sand. It keeps me awake, it gives me this endless, relentless drive for more and more and more, each tiny cranial space stuffed to the ceiling with bits of paper marked IDEAS! and TOMORROW! and, I could this THIS! And I love it, I do. It makes me feel plugged into something huge. I love jumping into its current and letting it speed me away. I want to go fast. I love fast.

But I have a body that doesn’t like it, and I always have. From so tiny I learnt that my times of running and skipping and FLYING, which is what it would feel like, would mean getting right to the top, fingers outstretched, before something in the mechanics would give and I’d have to brace myself for the crash. And it always comes. Like night follows day, if I fly I have to pay for it, screaming angrily and frustratingly all the way down. And I pay for it with tiredness, and pain, and limbs like lead dragged through treacle. I pay for it with slow. That’s the illness, that’s my wiring, and like it or not, it’s just how things are.

As part of my treatment, for years and years, I was taught that my secret was pacing. I must learn to temper slow and fast with even, steady. Not too much, not too little. And when I was very, very ill, when the slow had won for a long, long time and fast was defined more as having the energy to get up and get myself dressed, than about spending the weekend speeding about on trains having adventures, when I was that ill, even was the only thing for it. I had to give up fast. I had to. I missed it. And I resented it hugely, and it would make me angry, the energy I wished to be pouring into life trapped somewhere I couldn’t get it. But I was patient and after very many hard lessons learnt I got well again. I got very well. I got my fast back and oh god it was wonderful.

When life began again, I was told to carry on with the pacing, with the careful measuring of time and energy to avoid the massive crashes. And I did, I was careful. But I am me, I am the galloping horse, and Tigger with his bounce, and a firework with a lit fuse, and I was growing strong on fresh air and new experiences and that part of me was keen, it was hungry and I decided, actually, I didn’t want to live life in the even, steady lane.

So these days I let myself fly. I let myself run. I embrace fast and let it speed me away. I let life take on a momentum that goes and goes and GOES and I feel alive and free and I go faster and faster and I stretch and I stretch and I STRETCH, and I get to touch a bit higher, and then with a happy sigh I wrap myself up and let myself fall. And that’s what changed my life. That’s what made me whole, in the end, and really, properly well, well in the way that matters. I learnt that the falls were worth it, and, better even than that, I have learnt that there is something at the bottom that’s special and that I had missed, in all that time I spent angry looking resentfully back up at where I wanted to be.

Because, you know, slow can be lovely. I am learning to love it as much as the fast. When my body gives in, which it does, frequently, like today in fact, there is pain and there is a crushing fatigue but if I relax into it, if I don’t fight it, which, turns out, was what I was doing pretty much my whole life, if I LET that take me as completely as I do the fast, it can be magic and beautiful. There are things here that you miss if you’re going too fast. When your legs make you walk slowly you notice shadows that you wouldn’t otherwise. You notice things on the pavement, and snails climbing walls. You NOTICE.

If I’m going to have to do slow, then ohh I’m going to do it well. When my body says stop now, I do. I’ll get to go fast again, because I’m learning that if I rest properly the refuelling takes less time anyway. And in the meantime there is still lots to do. There are long naps to be had, and dreams to play out in my head. There is early nights with a new book that gives me a world to live in while I’m taking a break from this one. There is the steady, slow, click click of knitting needles, and the sound of a blinking camera shutter.  I find all the slow I can and I swim in it. I let it it hold me up as I drift and rest. And I don’t think about fast, I just enjoy where I am.

Today slow has won. I lived hard this weekend and I must accept the pay-off. So I’m going to go sit and let a ink slowly work its way over paper as I sit and sip tea slowly. And the things that need speed can wait a while. The housework can pile up, and emails can wait, and I can let the slow tick tock rock me till I’m ready to go again.

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Now it’s your turn. Tell me how time affects your life

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the Linky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) – it’ll be open til Sunday night so if you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve got plenty of time to join in. Don’t forget that anyone can take part! New prompts will be up this time next week, so I hope to see you back soon.

Day late, I know. Shh, let’s pretend you haven’t noticed.

Ready for your new prompt?

(For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.)

Prompt

Tick tock tick tock. Time seems to be taking on funny properties in our house just now. There are very little spaces in between things, rushed sleeps and food, in between pounding the pavements and juggling, well, EVERYTHING. Sometimes it seems like it’s getting ever faster, ticktockticktock, yet evey so often you hit a pocket of time that seems to stretch on and on forever, like the time sat in the dark waiting for the boy to finally sleep.

Tick

Tock

So your prompt this week is TIME.

Tell us how time affects your life. Perhaps you could describe those moments when time slips away from you, trying to capture it in words and rhythm, helping us feel what your life feels like when it’s galloping away. Or perhaps you could describe a moment when time seems to slow right down. What do you notice? What grabs your attention, in the rushed moments and the moments of stillness?

What makes you stop? What slows time for you? You could share something from your life now, or from memories past, or make something up! Perhaps you’d like to describe your perfect time-stopping moment. 

Now…

Decide how you’d like to respond, write your post and publish it on your blog between now and NEXT MONDAY. On Monday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then, if you can, take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comments. We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Monday’s round-up. And, of course, if blogging isn’t your thing, you could always use the prompts for private, off-line writing too.

Enjoy!

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I wish.

Oh, I wish for lots of things.

I’ll start with a front door. It is duck-egg blue and the paint is slightly faded and peeled from the sea air because that is where I am, by the sea. Within walking distance of a beach, the rough and pebbly kind, with more sky over it than my eyes know what to do with. There are geraniums by the door, and a thick door mat, and if you stand and look up, you would see the house clambering up high, a bit patchy and crooked, leaning into the wind, with square windows set in places you think they shouldn’t be. It is my house, the house I wish for.

Through the door is a hallway, with space for dirty boots and wet coats and geometric tiles on the floor the colour of dry earth. And the beginnings of a staircase, climbing round and up, old, dark wood. The downstairs living rooms are small and piled high, the sitting room walled with heaving bookshelves, and chairs and sofas that don’t match, big enough to sit with your feet tucked under, with blankets strewn ready over an arm or a back, all grouped around an open cast-iron fire. Half-finished knitting projects, or open paperbacks with their place marked by resting them over an arm would give away where I had last chosen to sit.

The kitchen is light and open has a big table. The sink is the deep, enamel kind, and no doubt contains half-drunk mugs of tea, for even in my dream life I doubt I’ll remember to drink the whole lot before getting distracted. Double bay doors look out onto a small garden, half wild. It will have an apple tree, of course, as all the best gardens should, and the kind of flowers that smell heavenly rather than look tidy. It will be a home to bees and snails and, yes, oh yes, there would have to be room for chickens, too. The sound of their scratching and clucking reaching me through the doors I opened every morning, whatever the weather, to sit and drink tea as I woke up far too slowly for any respectable grown-up, same as now, accompanied, perhaps, by a ginger cat with a tail that never stops and who likes to wind around your ankles like yarn. On the table lie bank statements not yet opened, and containing the story of enough money to pay bills and buy fish and chips at the weekends and fund the odd Amazon splurge and guilt-free shopping trip.

The walls of my house would be heavy with art. My own and of people I loved and admired. Paintings and photography and textiles. And treasures. Lots and lots of treasures, dotted onto spare surfaces and window ledges and shelves. Things I had found on the beach or in the woods or picked up off the street. Stones and shells and twisted wood and feathers and pine cones and leaves I liked the colour of that have dried to dull tones.  Things I had found in junk shops and had been given to me by people who knew me well and knew how much I love beautiful, unusual things. And there would be lots of reminders of adventures ventured. Cards from people I had visited. Ticket stubs pushed into picture frames, photos of places visited pinned onto boards. It would be an alive house. A life house.

Upstairs, winding my way up the the stair case that makes my taller house guests have to stoop a little, a half-closed door, leaking out the sound of some activity or another, or music I probably don’t like and yet still know all the words to. It would always make me stop and rest my hand there, to the point of which you can begin to see the outline of my palm, often grubby, having rested there so many times, as I reached through to the boy within. My happy, healthy, unique boy. Who can talk and who has lost none of his passion and curiosity and imagination and ways of seeing and expressing. Who has good friends and who feels loved. A spare bedroom or two would mean weekends were never lonely and my friends, whom my life would be rich with, would always have a place to stay and fall into once we’d drunk too much wine and stayed up too late.

And up again, to the top, where I would have my den. A space of light and skylights and a big low bed with a duvet as thick as you could buy with quilts on top and a profusion of pillows, enough to make an orthopaedic expert frown.  In the space there would be paint and canvases and paper and charcoal and a laptop to write on and a camera with more than one lens. And there, and in the world around me, I would make a decent living and find new things to get excited about and captivated by every day. Through a door there would be a bath big enough to sink in up to your chin, and a shower where  the water was always hot and strong. And if you stood and peered out the window and looked over the garden, you could see the roof of the old but reliable camper van which is the only vehicle I own, the same blue as my front door and packed ready to drive off and find somewhere new to park over-night where I could watch the sun rise.

And maybe, just maybe, there would be a man, with kind eyes that noticed the right things and strong arms, who used his hands and his heart to work and liked to cook so I didn’t have to, and talked too much and wasn’t afraid to feel or take risks. That would be good too.

That’s what I wish.

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Now it’s your turn. What do you wish for?

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the Linky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) – it’ll be open til Sunday night so if you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve got plenty of time to join in. Don’t forget that anyone can take part! New prompts will be up this time next week, so I hope to see you back soon.