Mar 15, 2012

she had a title for this but

she lost it, it slipped through her fingers, the cracks in the floor, together with her magic touch for words. She's lost it. Once the tears were fuel, and the more she cried, the more words would come fluttering out of her head onto the screen and it would be magic. Now the sidewalk tears still come like they did, she still recites paragraphs as if from memory, as if they weren't being conjured only as she was saying them, they flow out like magic still and she imagines them pretty on paper, pretty just like that. Then she comes back to her glass nest again but the magic touch is gone; gold doesn't spill out of her fingertips like it used to. And if the sidewalk tears don't transform into gold dust then they're still just tears; no matter how much you try to use sheer willpower to change them they're still nothing but transparent pain that seeps through your fingers.

And she's so tired of this now, so tired of all the pain having nowhere to run that she's becoming afraid to feel. And that's dangerous for her, because if she's afraid to go near emotion then she can have all the magic inside her and still it will produce nothing. But she's afraid, and you can't blame a girl too tired of the sidewalk tears. Too tired of images in her head as vivid as they were when she used to be able to bring them to life, and now they're just stuck there, tormenting her, a parallel universe to which she can't give light. Now she shies away from fires, cowers at tunnels, runs away from dazzling beauty. Oh she won't go near the birthday candles and the roses. No more colour. No more life. Safety in monotony.

Mar 1, 2012

The Chrysalids

"Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily."

"'Women like to think they're in love when they want to marry; they feel it's a justification which helps their self-respect... No harm in that; most of them are going to need all the illusions they can keep up, anyway. But a woman who IS in love is a different proposition. She lives in a world where all the old perspectives have altered. She is blinkered, single-purposed, undependable in other matters. She will sacrifice anything, including herself, to one loyalty. For her, that is quite logical; for everyone else it looks not quite sane; socially it is dangerous.'"


I learnt to live half a life