Monday 5 February 2018

Here we go again.......

Hello to the New Year, new goals and all that rubbish everyone blithely abandons in a week or two from now....

I used to love blogging but then became weirdly anxious about it. I felt this odd pressure to 'perform'. To produce SOMETHING. ANYTHING. So I fell out of love with it, and instead became angry (which I have realized at my semi-advanced age, is my go to response to feeling anxious-I get angry & lash out when I'm not actually angry at all, just nervous & a bit overwhelmed.) All this was completely started, traversed and finished inside that small space between my ears. None of it caused by, or even witnessed by, anyone else. It became yet another stone added to the weight of shit hanging around my neck and adding to my stress. So I stepped away. A small cloud of blackness cleared and I felt lighter, in at least that small respect.

So I have decided not to perform. I have decided to blog when I have something to say, or something to show you. I crochet a lot. I make handbags. I 'art' a bit. And when I can't stop thinking about an idea, I write. So- here is a little story I recently wrote, and one of my most recent crochet projects.
Enjoy




                                                        The Weight

Once there was a girl with a hole in her chest where her heart used to live. She was rather fond of the hole, left it bare and bleeding for every one to see, decorated it, put scaffolding up.

It wasn't long before spiders and caterpillars and dust bunnies gathered round the scaffolding. Soon the floor became swampy and spongelike, collecting the glittering diamond tears that fell after her heart went the way of all things that were long abandoned, eventually dissolving into nothing. People simply ignored the hole, same as lovers had ignored the heart that left it. It grew stinging nettles, poison ivy, became so clogged with weeds there wasn't room for anyone or anything else and it hurt to breathe,  pinched and scratched when she tried to fit things in. 

So she ripped out the parts that made her feel, the parts that were painful, and filled it instead with concrete and barbed wire, flushed out the last remaining diamond tears, and made it an altar of stone where no one could brush up against raw nerves.

Time passed and she no longer even noticed the stoop of her shoulders, the cramp in her back from the weight of the concrete, until come the day it occurred to her that she wanted to fly. Try as she might, the pull of earth on the concrete was too strong and she stayed grounded, dragging useless and unfulfilled in the gutter, scraping her concrete heart against the curb. 

She picked at the edges of the wound, it tasted of caramel sauce, blood and regret. Examining it stung, every touch made her wince with self reproach. But she picked and picked until the mortar loosened, and the altar crumbled, and she kicked the weight from her chest. Her chest uncurled and opened like flowers blooming towards the sun. 

Then the girl and her hole flew away where warm sweet breezes hummed softly as they blew through the ever decreasing crawlspace, and the spiders and dust bunnies packed up the scaffolding and went off in a huff, unable to bear the song that her heart sang as it regrew until the hole was no more.