Sedate and Isolate

He started the story on the same day; they began another report on him. He couldn’t tell anyone about the story. He saw it as too fragile in its trembling tenuous beginning, only the spark of an idea. The idea was too delicate and somewhere inside he thought it was too perfect to exist, would crumble and crack upon exposure. That was the nature of perfection he thought and it was something he thought often about, spent restless nights wondering upon. All his ideas seemed perfect without execution. He thought if he was only an idea he could be perfect too. So that’s why he was terrified of exposing the idea, of seeing its flaws. He knew he should tell them everything but he could not bring himself to tell them this. He had an idea if only inkling and that was the best feeling he knew of. Inside his head there was scratching, scrabbling the idea moved relentlessly, yearning for its freedom. He tried to slow it down, keep it apace, let it out slowly but it wanted to surge, to flow, to surround and suffocate, to consume and become him. Obsession gave pure purpose. Obsession respected time, regarding it not just as space to be filled. Obsession believed in never stopping at mere amusement or distraction. Obsession was a type of pleasure. Obsession made identity disappear. Part of him wanted to give up, to collapse helpless by the idea but he knew he mustn’t, for then it would be obvious. He mustn’t let them know or they would take it from him. He fought with himself, he pulled himself together. He must act like them and they will never know of the idea.

He wanted to write about an author. It’s easier to put yourself into characters, become lost in one’s own territory where you could invent the landscape. It’s easier to write when you could relate. You could spend lifetimes exploring yourself, make a thousand characters and still not find you. You could wholly immerse yourself in the story that way. That was why the main character would serve two purposes. It was easier to write about yourself, thereby facilitating your own immersion in the story and second that was exactly what he wanted to write about happening to the character making it doubly easier for him to write about, for the creative process. The character, the man he was writing the story about would be writing a story. The idea was that his character should have the intention of writing a story that when read, the lines between fiction and reality would start to melt away. He would crave to make the distinction between reality and art slip seamlessly away, which was also his intention in writing the story itself. Indeed that was the best form of art, art that made you forget it was art, art that fed upon you, art that required so much of your attention you felt as if it was digesting you, that it was taking you, that you were becoming it. That it had taken your now, that it was your now. Yet most will be able to draw themselves back, re-establish the distinction, step back from what was and carry on with the daily but this was not what he wanted to write like. He wanted to write something that had life in it so that it was inseparable, something without ending because in art a good ending defies the meaning of an ending, it stays with you, a good ending never ends. So he was writing about a character who wanted to do the same thing. The character was mirroring his pursuit but the character was unaware he was being used for the exact thing he was trying to achieve. A problem emerged then if he was writing with the purpose of blurring others reality and doing so by writing about a character with the same intention, how could he keep his characters reality intact in the process of writing it? The problem frustrated him, how could he literally keep his character sane and have his character achieve his aims? The problem felt like a physical presence blocking his way. He incubated the problem and continued writing; it would come to him surely as one thing comes after another. They have no idea he thought happily to himself as he continued writing. It gave him pleasure knowing they had no idea what he was working on. No idea he had an idea.

The words became like dominoes, tipping one after the other, blending together into line into pattern, one brought about the next and so the solution came to him. Why did he need to keep his character’s reality intact in the process of the character writing his intended masterpiece. They would become their masterpiece. They would suffer for their art. They would have hallucinations and delusions. Their art would invade and infect their very life. The character in his story would start to see the characters in his story as if they were real, would be unable to tell the difference. The characters the character invented would harass and follow him, keep him awake force the character in the story to keep writing the story to stay true to his intention. Yes he thought, that was what was needed in the story, a dream and then pain. The pursuit of perfection and the pain that comes in the process was needed, not the resolution of happiness and completion of the intention. For happiness was difficult and tedious to express although beautiful to live. Pain was difficult to live but was beautiful when expressed. Fuelled by his idea, he stayed up into the night writing, writing about a character plagued a[i]nd tormented by his creation, a character sleepless and bent on a dream and he too became sleepless and bent on a dream. After writing for hours, deep in the night he collapsed asleep amongst his work.

He awoke startled. The man next door was screaming. He quickly came to his side. He tried to calm him, tried and tried but the man was raving hysterical. There was obviously no one there but the man kept screaming ordering invisible people to leave him, to let him sleep, to let him alone, saying he would finish the work in the morning. What work? He asked but the man only screamed more. He phoned an ambulance and the man was carried away. Concerned and curious over the man’s well being, he went to the hospital next day to enquire. Since the man had received no one thus far, a nurse drew him aside assuming he was a friend or relative. She seemed oddly familiar to him although he could not place her. The man played along using the situation to ask his own questions while secretly thinking this would be good material for the story. Has there been a diagnosis he said. He’s highly psychotic she replied, he was writing and now he believes the characters are real and are constantly harassing him. The man suddenly felt uncomfortable. Really? He asked gingerly. What was he writing about, do you know? He happened to keep his journal with him until today, until they found it. The doctors have examined the contents... she paused and seemed reluctant to go on. The man prompted her. Convinced himself he was not lying he was acting, for lying was only an act the audience is not aware of. She relented and continued, this is the peculiar thing she said, he seems to be writing about exactly what has happened to him, he was writing a story about a writer trying to write a story and whom eventually loses his sanity under the belief the characters in the story are real. Suddenly he was infuriated, that was his idea, and somehow the man had stolen it from him. He wracked his brains thinking of how this man he had not seen until today could possibly have gotten hold of the material, confused and annoyed he walked away from the nurse back to the man. How dare he? He thought. He confronted him at his bedside, your story is exactly my idea he said. The man started from his sleep, opened his eyes and grinned slowly but I am your idea he said.

The man drew back terrified. He paced the room. He closed his eyes and opened them again. What hospital was this? He could not answer the question. How long had he had this neighbour? He could not answer the question. How come he had never seen this neighbour until no[ii]w? He could not answer the question. The man in the bed kept talking to him, talking about endings, the best way to end the story. Suddenly he felt so weary so exhausted so tired. Shut up he screamed, let me be, leave me alone. His screaming triggered the other mans and mirrored his own. Another nurse came into the room; she walked straight past him as if he were a ghost. A doctor followed again ignoring his hysterics and tending to the hysterics of the man in the bed. We need to sedate and isolate him the doctor said. The last thing the man shouted was, now you have your ending.

He woke up almost in a fever, his brain felt almost on fire, I have an ending, I have an ending he thought and yet he could not remember what it was. He had dreamt the ending. He must keep writing he thought, if he kept writing it would come back to him, come out of him, he would have his ending. He must act normal. He mustn’t let them know, he mustn’t let them know for they would be calling him soon.

Across the table, the doctor spoke, you can’t remember what happened during the night? He nodded. You had to be sedated, you had another psychotic episode. We need to find out what triggered this episode the doctor said, what were you doing that that might have triggered the episode? He looked outside the window in the interview room. There was an oddly familiar man talking to a nurse, also familiar but whom he did not recall working here from any other day. Suddenly it came rushing back to him. He had his ending. I need to finish, I need to finish he repeated and repeated. Finish what? The doctor enquired but he only continued to repeat I need to finish, I need to finish each sentence reaching a higher pitch. The doctor despaired, put his head in his hands called two nurses. Sedate and isolate him he ordered.

After committing him to isolation, in his room they found pages and pages. Pages of a story. A story just like this one.

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The Dome

The Dome

The grass is wet, long, it streaks smoothly against her calves, clinging as she continues to walk. A million capsules of dew hanging precariously off the slender elongated strands. Unbeknownst to her, some fall melt into the already sodden ground. They no longer occupied their unstable and insecure existence on the edge; they became unified with the environment as a whole. They are unlike her as she still clings to distinction and division, to herself. The night is so dark and the space is so wide, it as if the sky curves to meet the horizon line, the edges in the field in which she walks. A barely discernable line at the front of her vision marks the elusive boundary where space meets solidity. Darkness holds more silence than light and in the distance the laughter of her friends seems louder than it should. They circle a fire orange sparks sprinkle the air around them. She hugs her coat closer, quickening her step now as the previously star lit sky is blighted by clouds moving in from somewhere behind her. She feels the packets in her pockets shift against her thigh due to the added pace. She thinks of them now, their round white forms, the physicality of something that holds feeling. She lets her eyes rest on the edges of the surroundings before letting them travel up on the curve of the sky. A sudden discomfort arises in her, the way the space stretched so far and the sky reached to meet it was almost dome like. The clouds now seemed to roll and gather, a deep roll of thunder reverberated around her; the rain fell hitting her face, sliding and trickling down her coat. She was frozen now, trapped in her thoughts, watching her friends far away. Making movements suggesting the lowering of heads, pulling up of hoods, gathering closer together. They seemed so utterly separate to her now. Her breath was coming shorter as she struggled to think. What was wrong? Suffocation moves in and she feels trapped as if she were in a real dome. She imagines a hand encircling her whole surroundings, her entire perception at that moment until the rain falls and her head trembles unearthing memories untouched, memories never remembered, whatever it is that comes before a memory stirs. The walls of her skull quake and memories are born.

When her dad came back he gave her a snow globe. She sat it on its base of plastic, on the locker beside her bed. The plastic swans gazed out solemnly from their small world, resting on a mirror to appear as if floating on a small lake. She tapped the glass and wondered if they could see her, wondered if they could see the line that prevented them from escaping. Her small hands would lift it, tip and watch as the glitter softly settled on the heads of the swans and their surroundings. A little world, immutable, unchanging, immune to the effects of time itself. Unfortunately her mother was not immune to the effects of time and as time passed all it came to symbolise was the length of the father’s absence. Innocent to the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘hows’ of living, forgiveness was not even needed for her fathers disappearance as constant discovery was how she lived her life, his departure and return was hardly significant in the rich patch work of experience she was creating for herself. It only took its place among other notable discoveries such as chewing colouring pencils would give you a beautiful rainbow coloured mouth. This was starkly different for her mother where she had one frayed thread, her mother experienced a huge tear, a gaping hole, and one, which could not be filled or forgiven by a snow globe. So they moved. School was a vastly different place from home. Home was freedom. In the evenings she would find herself in the fields. There were no boundaries, there was light and dark but no time. She would always inevitably return to her mother, to stories and comfort and sleep and awake to find the prospect of a new to even further her explorations. In nature the lines were not wholly apparent, shapes were misshapen organic, and blurred but in school there were lines everywhere. You must stand in a line before entering the classroom, you must write between the lines and colour inside them, even the chalked markings of hopscotch represented structure that was unknown to her. the trouble started around five, at a time of growth and absorption. She was a child of trouble the teachers said. Her upbringing was totally wrong they said. She should be taught discipline they said. She would be forced to the front of the classroom, small and meek below a stern gaze to explain, drawing on the walls or not coming in when the bell rang among other things. She would return home daily in storms. Inside confusion brewed that she was incapable of expressing. Why were there certain things we had to do in the first place, where did rules start and end? As she grew older she still sought the comforting solace of open space but one day as she gazed at the horizon a decisive shift occurred in her very self. As she looked out into the distance, discomfort arose, the same discomfort and from the same source that would later force her to remember this moment in the future. Too young to wrestle, to reason with emotion, she only felt an overwhelming suffocation. If she had been able to find the words she would have said she felt trapped, that in place of space and solace boundaries still existed. She would have said that in that moment the lack of control she had became apparent, that she felt the world surrounding her, even in nature was trying to impose limits on her. It was at this point that she began to desperately yearn to escape. She would have said it reminded her of a snow globe, surrounded, trapped characters unable to see beyond and there was always a beyond, even beyond beyond, subjected to the fate of others commands but instead she was unable to express any of this, she only felt something shift, something change like the wind as it rustled through the nearby trees shaking the branches and letting droplets plummet to the ground.

And so anger grew within, boiled and bubbled from the source of the discomfort. She couldn’t explain what she had felt in that moment and she had no direction in which to place it. Soon it took on a life of its own, garnering a path from outside experience, the influences in which she had grown up with, direct example. Why had her mother felt angry? She answered that question herself and in doing so found her anger direction. The small hands which joyfully accepted a gift all forgiving and completely unawares and innocent of the context in which it was given now gripped that same gift with an intensity which made her knuckles pale. Emotion can be so powerful, it was separate itself from consciousness as if it is a separate entity, broken free, released from a cage and not of ourselves. In this way anger blinds and she is unable to remember how those hands moved, what thoughts ran through her mind, she can only see smashed fragments of glass, a silver sparkly stream of water dissipating through the wood grains staining them darker and the intense flecks of red, their warmth present on her hands, her cheeks damp with tears. The eye of the forever silent swan gazing up at her. A swan who had escaped the place in which it was trapped, something she herself felt would never happen to her.

But now she felt the world quaking just as that swans must’ve. She looked at the sky imagining huge cracks running through it as if it were broken glass. Beyond the hedgerow a car stopped. She heard the door slam, footsteps on the tarmac. She saw her friends silhouettes moving, smoke spiralling through the air, heard hissing as the fire quenched from the rain and stamping feet. The orange of the fire, their forms against the black night reminded her of the melting malleable colours that seep in between your eyelids when your half way between sleep and wake. Now they had spotted her, gesturing, calling wildly, running hoods pulled up, backs bent. She was trapped in her thoughts, somewhere a voice urged her to move to run after them but in her a deeper sense felt calm, devoid of urgency. She looked at the curve of the sky, seeing it now just as the sky rather than a dome, a wall, a barrier. How had she felt these things? How had she carried this anger? She was never trapped by the world, for she had given names to things, she had called the sky a dome. She was trapped by herself. She let her hands rest on the ziplock bags in her pockets, she had no need to escape now. She used to be so sure but now she didn’t know what she was escaping from so she let them fall into the long grass. She was aware of the flashlight walking towards her, details emerging from the shadows. She was used to authoritative demanding voice that now ordered her to stay still. Somehow she felt choice in that order, before it was pure order, stay still, therefore she must bolt but now it was choice, she could remain or she could flee. She felt her life suspended, frozen in animation. She felt as a drop of dew as it precariously holds to a blade of grass, clinging to the unstable life it had lived while a new weight pulled it down.

Thinking ahead

Thinking Ahead.

The world was disintegrating, over population and environmental degradation among other issues was destroying the planet. It was decided that everyone be equal and more importantly that everyone be great. It was decided that a complete and utter fresh start was needed, that people and history itself would be wiped clean. For this to happen huge sections of the population had to be exterminated. The immorality of this offended most to the extreme and huge protests and revolts were held against the idea. However since it was the only viable solution, leaders of the world were determined to go ahead with it. Among the voices of dissent were some of the greatest minds, they spoke of compassion, and they searched for another way. Eventually they reached a compromise. People would be made feel as if they lived their lives despite having not. It was not the issue of people dying that was contentious or important, as the sheer amount of people was un-necessary, obstructive; it was the issue that they would never get to experience life and the awareness that they had caused this. Their own reverence for life and reluctance to die motivated them to search for this compromise. They would give everyone the memories of an entire and realistic life. The people who were decided to die lived their lives on unbeknownst, had families who lived their lives unbeknownst, meanwhile lives were lived completely and purely dedicated to giving others the impressions that they had lived their lives. A whole section of the population, the scientists who would all inhabit a new society when the rest would die worked on the memory development. Eventually they were ready and the people were all given the impression that they had lived their lives. They were filled with memories that they could reflect on before they died. A life after all is essentially just a collection of memories.

And so a new society was born filled with only the best minds and with no memory beyond the extermination. The structures were there, the technology and resources needed but no memory beyond everything was destroyed and to counter this more was destroyed and a new start was implemented. Society then evolved and grew. It went through numerous changes. As culture progressed, people no longer became consumed with distraction and entertainment. In fact although such was not abolished, it was forgotten. People turned to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding and became consumed by that instead. However this shift led to the full and constant awareness of our own mortality. The idea that the unknown would eventually disregard all out endeavour that would obscure everything we had done with something else or absolute nothing. In this regard, all immediate concerns were abandoned as people solely concentrated on finding out what that end would bring, what the point of it all was. The most essential things were abandoned and life fell in disrepair. Eventually it was realised that sectors of the population would have to be designated to perform certain jobs in order to sustain life and hence sustain the pursuit to discover what exactly the end would bring. Whereas before naturally people would have voluntarily fell into such occupation, now since we had completely disregarded entertainment and abandon to the moment, since the end was now always fully in sight people shunned away from all such work, terrified that they would be wasting their time. It was soon apparent that they would not be wasting their time, as it was necessary to sustain the others who would be concentrated on the original aim so they relented. However the egoism of some others who wanted a greater part in the ultimate pursuit as it became known made war break out. Significant portions of the population died. They neared the edge of complete obliteration before awareness dawned again. They had forgotten of the ultimate pursuit for war. Were they wasting their time killing instead of trying to find out why they were alive? People realised they were wasting their time, time which could be used finding out what exactly it was their time was being used for. So they fell back into the pattern before war again, the normal structures of life degraded. People fell ill and died.

The awareness that it was happening again plunged the population into a deep despair. This time as they knew they had already attempted to designate certain portions of the population to certain jobs and failed, they did not attempt it once again. They instead fell into hopelessness. Whereas before they may have distracted themselves to the absolute extreme, earned money to eat and live, then watch television to distract oneself in between. These options were completely unavailable. There was no such thing as distraction anymore. There was urgency in every moment and the awareness of the end was completely consistent. Despair was suffocating. Whereas before their sole aim was to find what their time was for, their sole aim now became to develop ways in which to stop themselves killing themselves. The greatest scientific minds became obsessed with ways to keep themselves and everyone else alive. This aim was made twice as difficult given those minds were similarly infected. The aim was made three times as difficult as they had no knowledge of how people distracted themselves before. It was destroyed with history. They had no concept of distraction for its own sake, of simple amusement. They needed a solution they needed to make them forget that there is an end, that they will ever die. So they developed drugs that made people forget, that sedated to the moment. The drugs were originally resisted but soon they were forced upon the population. The resistance never broke into war instead of war resistance came in a wave of suicide. However the scientists who developed the drugs took them themselves hoping that the drugs would allow them not to feel such hopelessness at the same time as allowing them to continue in the pursuit of the ultimate purpose. Initially this was the case, however soon some began to focus on other things besides the ultimate purpose; they broke into individual endeavour to distraction and amusement. Eventually they stopped needing the drugs. Some fell into the occupations to sustain the rest, such that were originally resisted. The population grew less stable. Most forgot about the ultimate purpose, they lived and died without consistent awareness that they were living and dying. They began to die before they knew they were alive. The drugs were forgotten, then their children never knew about the drugs to begin with, society was developed, more technology emerged. Money was made. The population got out off hand again. People started to feel frustrated again, the planet was being destroyed again but no one knew it was an again. They tried to think of a solution.

The Butterfy House

The Butterfly House

The greenhouse was full of butterflies, the butterfly house. Emperors, admirals, peacocks and royal blues. Eyes on wings solemnly looking out at you through the leaves. Big and small and of every colour. They would land on you as silently as dust settling, closing and opening their wings. The intricate and bright detail, the astonishing number of them. Sometimes they would erupt in clouds above me like an explosion of living fireworks, a sparkling volcanic eruption, a champagne bottle uncorked releasing living colour. She hated them and I never knew.

When you walked the winding country lanes, along each twist and turn, you could almost always see the house. It stood on the highest hill, overlooking the hedgerows and all their diverse life, overlooking the grass which had struggled and succeeded in growing up through the tar on the bumpy roads, overlooking the village, the business and the gossip, overlooking the children which had struggled and succeeded in growing up away from the village, overlooking the struggles of all nature trivial and tragic, oh if you could understand those creaking floorboards, the groaning of the pipes, the shudder of old window frames, the stories you would learn, the stories that house could tell.

Not one person in the village could restrain themselves from craning their necks upwards and looking at the house as they passed by, whether from slight curiosity to simple habit to an insatiable desire to know something, anything of the houses inhabitants. Strange people the shopkeeper would add to the chatter of mass goers as they crowded into his shop on a Sunday morning, strange people the words would echo down the queue like a domino effect into the frozen section. The words strange people washed over the icy stiff wings of the chickens in the freezers as they sat almost frozen in agreement to it all. The same conversation had passed over themselves, their relatives, and their ancestors and as the factory churned the life out of chickens, the villagers churned the life, the meaning out of words. Strange people repeated and repeated. Strange people indeed, strange people, keep themselves to themselves, strange people alright was the sum total of elaboration on the statement that could be conjured. Strange was a judgement made when the opportunity to judge was nearly all but absent, a judgement made on the judgement of others, a judgement made on shadows and emptiness and yet such judgements held the conviction of steel. Yet when the flames licked the up to the tip top of the house, their minds became as blank as the basis for their judgements and as empty as their meaningless words.

The ivy had grown thick and strong, the green tendrils had snaked and tangled their way to the utmost reaches of the house. It was an incalculable journey taken by one sprouting seed grown into an undecipherable code of many routes. A rich tapestry made by a loom gone out of control, a web woven by a deranged spider, a road map to the farthest reaches of one’s imagination, destinations that could only be accounted for in ones dreams. It was disordered chaos yet with elusive control over its surroundings. It was completely natural. That’s what my grandmother would tell me, taking my hand into hers with surprising strength, blue veins popping out through pellucid skin. ‘let it remind you’ she whispered, whisps of grey hair falling into electric blue eyes , ‘that there is no how to living’. I was five at the time, struggling to grasp meaning but silenced by the sense of utmost gravitas. She let a trembling and watery smile surface, lips pulled back to a certain translucency, her one blue and one green eye completely focused, ‘how to live is with no how, naturally and without order’, her voice started to crack at the last syllable and I could hear the laugh brewing, a twinkle in the eye, a crinkle at the corner of the mouth, a tremor of the shoulders. ‘Eliza’ my mother’s voice pierced through a moment, ‘come and help me now’. Memories fade with time, maybe I should have listened to her more, maybe then it wouldn’t have happened. The heat, the blistering heat, clouds of smoke, my throat closing up.

On a par with the blanket of ivy, the most amazing thing about the house was the dome. The house was a square with four joining corridors and laid in the middle of it, perhaps where there should have been a courtyard was a domed shaped greenhouse. The dome reached higher than the other roofs, leaves pushed against every pane of glass, giving the impression of something trapped, life suppressed and yearning for escape but these were plants, they were driven through instinct not desire. So what of us? My grandmother would ask What is wrong with the people in this village is not that they are suppressed for we are all suppressed, for does the horizon, that barely discernable line marking the boundary between atmosphere and solidity, is that not just another boundary? When we think of things on a grander scale, are we not all just in a huge dome, sitting silently and unawares like plastic figures in a snow globe? Who decided the rules about space, we define big and small through ourselves but there is an entire world on that table we watched the insect scurry across today. No what is wrong with them is not that their desires are suppressed but that they suppress their desires. What is desire only instinct defined differently because it is burdened with traversing through human reason, human habit and our so called knowledge. Instinct is natural. Impulse is the decision based on the beat of ones heart, so closely connected to our natural selves that it doesn’t have to suffer through a process that will have it defined as desire. Follow impulse and instinct, listen to your desires she would tell me, live naturally, we can learn a lot from plants.

Once you took a step inside that greenhouse, nothing seemed trapped, it was wild. Leaves dripped with condensation and moisture, vines meandered along bark, branches hung low laden with growth, buds bloomed, petals curled. The glass was like the skin of a living breathing organism pulsing with life. I would take tentative steps as child gazing through these layers of life. The glass was like the separation between mind and body, where my tentative steps saw me delve into myself, tentatively stepping through the thick undergrowth. It was wild. I would gaze through layers of life, tiptoeing around puddles, my eyes following the darting flashes of colour, flutter of wings, brushes against my skin.

I think she enjoyed their curiosity, and even their suspicion and distaste. The suspicion and distaste was only the curiosity of those who disrespected the very feeling of curiosity, who only wanted to be satisfied with that which they thought they already knew. She’d put on a black velvet cloak, sparkling ruby rings and with the utmost care, she’d place a massive jewelled butterfly into her hair. She’d flaunt through the village head held high and ebony cane tapping out a rhythm that her eyes seemed to dance in time to. My mother was a different case, she would blush and stammer in the shop, cast her eyes downwards. Take the chatter as an insult; take the silence as an insult. Her hair was greying; her hands were weak, and her eyes dulling. She would sit at the table, her brow deepening, her head in her hands. She needs help she would tell me. As I got older I would come home late, come into the kitchen to make tea, find her sitting there. We should find her somewhere to go where she can get help my mother would say. I should’ve payed attention to her, listened to her words, not met them with the disregard and nonchalance typical of those silly teen years. I was so consumed to listening to myself, to obeying myself to surrendering to every spur and whim. I was rigidly disciplined as regards all I felt, I did whatever I told myself to do. Sometimes in the greenhouse, the plants would fight for sunlight. Straining and growing. The smoke constricting my throat, the acrid taste, what am I doing, going up to the house, leaping and dancing heat, flickering orange. Then the creaking the, the crushing thunder, in my ears, fire falling.

She hated them, their thin spindly bodies, the filmy tissue delicacy of their wings, their twitching attennae and the noise. You’d never think of the noise because it was so soft, barley barely audible. But there. The flutter, the close of wings, the alighting of bodies At night there were the moths in the house. In the darkness, the hair would raise on the back of her neck, knuckles paling to white as she gripped the duvet, her imagination would play tricks and every corner would be full of them, the house would groan and creak and strain under the millions of bodies settling their dusky wings and furry bodies in for the night. In the morning the light would be cast into the corners revealing only dust and cobwebs and her body was the only thing that groaned and creaked with weight, not the house. Then there was the litter of dead bodies on the ground. Those paper thin, terribly fragile things were once alive. Revolted, disgusted, she shrank away from her parents work, their passion, hid herself in her room whilst young. The stages from larvae to butterfly were studied by my grandparents but it sickened her. The very sound of the squish of pin into cork board or foam, the dead hung and labelled on walls, fascinating for some. Yet how well she hid it, how one can harbour under a life they hate when they don’t know anywhere else to go. She never did explore the greenhouse.

What a ridiculous man. Aware of each word, taking into account a reputation too small for our lives, a reputation too small for this world. An existence full of the regard for the opinions of others. He stopped speaking to her when she bought the bread, he would let her blush and stammer with shame. Feelings created from the awareness of others as opposed to the awareness of ones own self. He would let them talk. My father would. Strange people he would agree with the ongoing conversation when she left, as if he never knew her. What did he think when he saw those flames rising?

Heart thumping, I ran and ran. I ran as i felt the smoke invading my own mind, as well as every corner of my former home. Ash fell from the sky, were those dead wings, was the ash trying to fly? My gran’s familiar hand gripping my own, when I fell at the end of the road. The gravel, stands out. In the depth of chaos small details turned into the my whole world, the gravel sticking into my knee, spots of blood, brighter cleaner cut, a pixel enhanced image, a photo on a magazine cover, not my body. The blackness seemed to fall from a great height, like a comforting blanket thrown on top of everything. So I let myself be enveloped it, wrapped myself up in the security of nothingness, for that’s what we do with things that are horrific or terrible. In that case it seems to be natural to block out all we can’t handle, to dismiss which we can’t solve. Yet ignorance led to destruction and how can that be natural?

The younger me convinced myself that I was able to fly. I still have memories of flying, its hard to to keep telling myself they are attempts at deception by my younger persona. They're so real but I also know these memories were deviously crafted to appear so real. Meticulous and careful work and with such intent, with such foresight in knowing future years and knowledge would rob myself of the illusion I could fly. So detailed, I still remember the touch of rain before it falls , the droplets trembeled as they clung precarioulsy to the clouds, a million tiny gleaming baubles in a world suspended. But of course, I don't remember this. Its not really a memory. Yet at the same time, all memorys are patchworks, part reality but mostly infused by our own desires, diluted by ourselves marred by our own perception, seperated from the past. This is what I tend to write like. I write in the same way I remember, reality obsucred by my thoughts about myself and the world, disjointed, fragmented, with an aim to deceiving the future me, no this is really what happened, with conviction and intent, threaded with seeds that make the non-existent eisxt, leaps from conception to reality.