Slow Down, Set Pace

Getting older hits fast and hard, right into the face of the child who wished away their days; Head first into the mind of the teenager who lied about their age, to seem older and wiser and cooler.

“Slow down, set pace”. That’s what they tell you. Slow down, you have all the time in the world, at least all the time in your world anyways, because in the end that’s the only world that matters. It’s the only world you’ll ever really know. You’ll live every minute in a world which nobody else will ever experience.

Slow down, take off the clothes and the make-up you use to look older than your years. “Slow down, set pace” because every day that passes and every year that falls slowly into place like grains of sand in an hour glass, they’re all yours. They belong to only you; you have all the time in your world.

You’ll find with time that it really is your world, not theirs or ours. It will lose the acrid taste of selfishness soon enough. It won’t seem selfish when you realise that every second, which means so much to you in your world, which seems a lifetime to you as you grow second by second, to another your lifetimes are just seconds, because they have their own world to indulge in and worry about.

“Slow down, set pace” because even the lovers who give each other glimpses into their own worlds in hope of combining them still experience separate lifetimes. Time is a vicious thing which even the intensity of love has no hope of beating as it slips quickly away between your fingers.

And when it comes to the point that your world is slowly falling, collapsing all around you, being sieged by the troops of old age and disease… that’s when you’ll realise. You’ll look back and understand your world was everything to only you. Every lifetime lived in a second is all you ever needed. Your only wish will be to pick through those grains of sand which fell so rapidly, and “slow down, set pace”. You would wish to go back and walk before you ran.

After.

Regretfully lying naked, she clung to him, wrapping one arm around his waist and the other up under his head. The skin of their bodies, which was giving off a cool blue shine as it reflected the street lights fighting their way through the crack in the curtains, stuck with sweat. Although she pulled herself tightly to him, something that would have been out of character for her a year earlier; he simply hung one arm loosely around her bare shoulders and stared coldly away. Although she stared up at his face, hungry to catch his gaze, it never happened. She could feel his leg move slightly next to hers and feel him start to grow restless. Eager to climb out of the bed, to get away from what they had become, he made his excuses and pushed her arms away so he could sit up. Watching him pull his shirt on over his head she let herself fall backwards across the bed, and bit her lip sharply to stop any sign of the hopelessness she felt being exposed.

‘Suze, get up,’ he barked at her, ‘get up and get dressed. You need to go.’

She sat up slowly and dragged her body across the sheets to the edge of the bed where she reluctantly gathered her things. She remembered a time when she would say she had to go and he would beg for five more minutes, pulling her back down beside him. A time when he would whisper to her while they made love, a time when they made love and didn’t just fuck, a time when he didn’t simply manoeuvre her body into positions and carry on without a sound. It seemed the more Suze begged for him to show that side of him again, the more it fell from her grasp while she clawed desperately after it.

Fully dressed now, he stood up and turned to the door,

‘I’ll be waiting downstairs, hurry up’.

‘Andy,’ he turned towards her, not willing to hide his annoyance at her taking up more of his time, ‘can’t you sit here while I get dressed?’

He shook his head and fell heavily upon the bed next to her, sighing at how inconvenienced he felt. Because it was torture just to be with her now.

And that’s when she grew angry, silently, it grew and welled within her while she pulled the tights up over her calf. She was beaten down. She was bruised and broken; she was weak and had become everything she hated. She was mad, but if even a word was set free from her lips she knew he would walk out, he wouldn’t listen; because that was the arrogance she was in love with. Maybe if she could just talk to him, she could try and fix it all, and yet she drowned in her own cowardice as it was just better to feel him sitting next to her than risk him leaving her side, no matter how much integrity she lost; No matter how she loathed herself for loving him. Because the truth was, she had lied when she said she believed him every time he told her he loved her or talked about their lives together. Yet she had let herself give up and change everything. She wasn’t angry at him anymore for changing so much, for becoming so cold. She was angry at herself.

The truth was, she was tired of sharing a bed every night with the stranger who was herself. She was sick of giving love to somebody who had spent a few months making her feel like everything to suddenly let her fall and make her feel so small, because the ones we love have the power. Whether you believe you’re strong or not, in the face of cruel love, you become weak and you have nothing. She was just very disillusioned with how she had become for somebody who knew nothing of what it is to burn.

Call Me Woman Scorned

I’ve lost myself in the rush, head rush, blood rush- ing through my veins that pulsate and explode in my fucking head. 

I’m blinded, blindsided, knocked off my feet and left to fend and fight and flee.

Call me Dido, suck the marrow from my bones and set a fire under my body, strewn across this pyre made of lies and broken promises.

Call me Salome, I should have slaughtered you, led you to bed and left with your head.

I should have hung you out to dry, pulled your fibres apart

Like I intended, like I wanted, like I knew I could never.

But I’m just angry maybe, maybe crazy, maybe desperate and a little frustrated, maybe.

Maybe…

Maybe I should say thank you.

You’ve given me the gift of nothing but this expression of grief that I will wear…and now I’ve a cross to bear to remind myself of you.

The Edge

I’m standing on the edge.

My toes sit across the overhang of the drop; below I can hear the wind and waves batter the cliff face. I look out across the darkness of the English Channel and watch the moonlight bounce on the heads of the fierce waves, which throw themselves at the coast. Taking a deep breath I shudder, the freezing salt air scratches and clings to my throat. A pain mirrored over the rest of my body, suffering the assault from the cold since I threw my clothes into the depths and leagues of darkness below. It seemed like a good definitive move at the time. But the empowered feeling has now turned to an awkward exposure, my hands holding onto the more intimate parts of myself to try and save some shred of dignity in the dark. 

I urge myself to push more of my foot over the edge. The adrenaline, which drove me to shed my clothes and stand on the edge, now seeping from me, leaving my head spinning. The wind picks up whole sections of my hair and they whip my face, my shoulders, my breasts and my back. It stings and makes my tired eyes water. The wind that beats my exposed figure is so strong that for a few seconds I entertain the thought that it might be possible for me to give myself up to it’s power. Let it pick me up and carry me above the water and these iconic white cliffs.

I’m standing on the very edge. Then I’m falling.

My ears fill with the sound of rushing air and I can’t breathe from the pressure of the fall. I gasp, panicked by the lack of air in my lungs.

When I hit the waves, they engulf me. My body is so fragile under the power of the Channel that I’m dragged down. Not that I can feel a thing. My body is numb from a combination of cold and the fall. I give myself willingly to the waves and let the peace of the water surround me.

I’m sure my eyes are open, but there’s just the calm darkness. No sign of the war that rages between chalk cliff face and rampant waves above me.

I feel tendrils of my copper hair drifting around my head. I feel my lungs pound in my chest, demanding air. I feel my lips part and the rush of water that feeds me my last sensory experience: the overwhelming taste of salt.

I was standing on the edge.

Unfinished

I started writing this today with the idea that an end would manifest as I wrote. It didn’t, but I didn't want it to be another waste of time, so here it is. If you take the time to read it, tell me where it can go. Give me a goal for an otherwise pointless day.

I shielded my tired eyes from the blinding reflection of the sun on the white walls. This room felt sterile, the floor coated in a cream coloured laminate flooring and the walls bare. I stood and wondered why there was a lack of furniture as I rubbed at my eyes, which were sore with the longing to close and give in to the release of sleep. A film of tears blurred my sight for a second and made me feel dizzy. I wanted to leave this room; it all seemed too pure for a soul that could only be described as corrupted. It seemed too pure for me and my body, which showed the scars and tell tale signs of abuse from a past riddled with sin. I fished my chubby fingers into my bra and scrambled for the familiar shape of the lighter I kept there, secret and safe next to the warmth of my bare breasts. My other hand slipped a shop bought fag from my bag and brought it to my chapped lips, which hugged the filter tightly as I lit the other end.

I inhaled sharply.

The first drag tasted stale in my dry mouth and made me feel sick. Why did I do that, I revelled in these things that made me feel crap. I hated fucking fags; they tasted like shit and made me feel dizzy. I smoked to be defiant, a persistent defiance that shone through in all aspects of my life and had made me a fuck up. I didn’t even know who I was defying: society, my parents, my safe boyfriend or maybe just my own body. I didn’t care who, I just needed to feel like I was in control.

    I turned towards the door and inhaled once again. I didn’t know who I was looking for; I didn’t even know where I was. I just knew that I hadn’t slept and I was hurting. It wasn’t a physical kind of pain, although my head pounded, but more of an inner pain. A hurt soul, heart ache maybe… 

Pathetic without the Fallacy

“It’s four in the morning,

Things are getting heavy and we both know that it’s over

But we’re both not ready.

You’re talking like a stranger, so I don’t know what to do
I’m callous and I’m cruel, to everyone but you.”

There are days of increasing darkness in life, soaked in tendrils of smoky cloud from a sky that is lacking in any sign of the sun. These tendrils, poisoned with droplets of rain that fall to the earth and crash against its skin, against your skin, these tendrils of elongated and grotesque fingers reach straight for your throat and take hold. They choke you from the inside out and make your skin crawl with scarab like insects that feed on your pain and the sadness welling up inside you.

I heard once that your eyes decide how you cry, the left is for joy and tears that come from feeling such happiness that it needs to escape your body in the flow of salty crystals that wetten your cheeks; the right eye is for pain, emotional and physical. It is this eye that weeps and sobs and wails… this eye that starts the flow of fat opaque droplets that roll solemnly down to the ground below. Much like the rain from the ominous grey that is present in the sky right now.

Pathetic fallacy is something that should be reserved for works of literature and poetry, not for life. These clouds can’t help a wounded mind as it pounds and falters… darkness should be reserved for those who need it: cat burglars and run aways. Not for the hurting, the waiting, who sit alone and stare out of the window while they reminisce. Writers are not meant for the real world, they create and dream; they don’t hold well under the real threat of real emotion. The bottle is a muse for the many who fall under the weight they carry as their hands and fingers create a different world.

From the girl who spoke to flowers to the boy who grew up righteous. On the days that get dark, days like this, they’re the ones who choke most and stumble from the wreckage they leave behind.

Ocean Room

This room has never felt as huge as I sit in the centre of the plastic wannabe wood covered floors, my knees pulled up to my chin as I try to collapse into myself. All I can do is think now, my prose that constantly boast lengthy and intricate lines, simplified to one word: Sorry. I trace the whitewashed walls with empty eyes and paint pictures across it in my head. I paint Pictures of us in autumn shades and I wish that I could change how certain things have happened. What did I ever do to warrant your distrust, to push you so far that you would need to rely only on yourself when you know I’ve given you everything?

If I could, I would do everything right, but I’m only human. I’ll only let you down.

This is all I can think about as I sit and drown in this suffocating room. A room that has grown so large around me that it might as well be called an ocean in the middle of Sidcup.