Posts tagged prose

scriptazine:

“Home” - the first issue of SCRIPTA is available now as a free PDF file!
We hope you like it, we hope you share it, and that you keep checking back for news on forthcoming issues.

 

scriptazine:

“Home” - the first issue of SCRIPTA is available now as a free PDF file!
We hope you like it, we hope you share it, and that you keep checking back for news on forthcoming issues.

 

jvpurcell:

I will fill a suitcase with my favourite stones, hide leaves between the pages of my books, line my sleeves with grain. I will carry a bouquet of twigs from the pine trees I grew up beside. I will call a murder of crows, a host of sparrows, a parliament of owls and when I get to you we will all build a tiny shack in a small corner of your land. We’ll build a strong foundation of rock I love, thatch a roof with straw and stick and there will be my Northern Place. And I would do that, trade all of it to touch your neck, trade the grasslands for your morning hair, the autumn wind for your voice. I would do that because there’s a part of home that matters more, that could be here but isn’t. It’s that you breathe. It’s that you live.

Try to get you off my mind, off of my tongue, out of my trembling fingers. Try to cut your image in two; what is reality and what is fantasy? What is expectation and what is hope? This is the restlessness when laying in bed, the taking stock of my body and counting it out. I am ten numbers given to you and I am also a dead line.

I dreamt last night you were on a flight back from Ukraine. I was talking with you, looking right at you through a computer screen - I’ve only seen you through a screen. The screen was larger than any I’d seen before, window-sized, and I could see your chest as you sat comfortably back, could see the rise and fall of it, soft and warm. We talked and laughed. There were old women in the seats behind you who refused to sit down. You shifted your body and when I realised I loved you, I could only lean through the screen and kiss you. You kissed me too. Then you laughed, said my face felt rough because I hadn’t shaved. I asked if it felt uncomfortable, you said it felt pleasant, and that was nice. I was in love with you, I believed it completely. Then you asked if I would hold you, said you’d never been held. You said that I could trust you. I knew. And you can trust me too, but only you.

The only way I can speak to you is through tiny letters, not the half-physical ones that I write myself and form myself, but letters already given shape and form, dark dots against a glowing white screen and then they are sent to you, looking nothing like me but I hope so much that they sound like me.

My fingers ache.

You have shut off the lights on me.

I will shuffle around on the carpet, old socks, humming against the friction of dragging wool on rug. Building up static, building electricity, and then I won’t touch a thing, not a single thing, until I can touch your chest and in the dark, I’ll show you a little lightning storm on each finger. Ah, suddenly it will become so bright - suddenly, you will see.

I’m mourning the loss of spring. I know she is coming again, but until then this will feel like a brief and powerful love affair that ended too soon. I curse in a small voice, not meaning the words but trying to hurt her a little. Where did you go in the night while I slept? Why did you leave then, at my most vulnerable?

And I feel a little foolish because I know that when she does come back, well, by then this silliness will have been forgotten. She will come back fresh and fragrant, breathing out onto this place, stirring the dust and raising the hanging, dead air out of here. She’ll bring the wind and play it against my coarse hair, lightly chiming. She will unpack her flowers, let loose the bees and I will want to leave the city. I’m saying all of the things that you say when love is lost, that you regret immediately but cannot retrieve, and I am scanning the highway for her.

It snowed today. Everything fresh and vibrant and hopeful about spring is again under a dense mat. It’s all water, in various states, but none of it is clean. Murky brown water runs down the roadside against mounds of dirt and ice topped with fresh snow, looming like rough granite. Everything is grey. The sky lost its blue just when I was beginning to lose mine.

I feel caught between these bed sheets.

So we’ve evolved. To each other, to ourselves, we are refined and civilized; we are the thinkers and inventors who don’t just live on the planet, but we also shape it, removing its parts and adding our own. We’ve evolved, if evolution means leaving the animal behind. We’re orderly and respectable and also perhaps passive.

Now we wait in lines under fluorescent white lights for a severed limb or entire carcass of dead animal, minimal blood on the styrofoam dish, squished beneath cellophane. We are quietly detached, no longer savage, cringing when we touch the limp, raw meat - still our mouths water a little.

My heart beats the way a fist pounds: suddenly, strong and hard and gone in an instant. I feel nervous, but why? I feel scratched up and worn down; a little see-through. I’m imagining snapping like rubber bands against my neck. This is a feeling I don’t want and so I say, “Today you won’t feel that way. It will end.”

But then it doesn’t and I become anxious and jittery, claustrophobic within myself and this life becomes too little and also too much. 

I am the last in my line.

When I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, I would lay in bed and want to weep because of the guilt. I felt guilty for who I was, for who I wanted to love; that I could not bring children into the world and give them my name and raise them and love them without harsh looks of judgement or hate or scorn. I felt ill knowing that one day, my lie would need to end. I would need to tell my family why there would be no child. I braced myself for a life without love or family or acceptance.

I’m remembering this because I thought today how nice it is not to feel this way anymore. How nice it is to look and speak to someone and feel that I care about him. I think about being with him, in his arms, in his sweater, in his hands.

I think that one day I may give my name to a child and try to show them how best to use it.

I’ve taken the garbage out. I’ve dipped my hands into the scalding water mixed with cheap dish soap and scrubbed the dishes clean. I opened a cupboard for a pot, turned on the stove and heated soup. I eat alone most nights.

My hands are dry, thinking about nothing and no one, except sometimes a boy who is real and is living somewhere. A man, I should say. He is beautiful, due in equal measure to his wonderful eyes and his kindness, his gentle voice.

There are dishes to wash again, then I’ll drain the water and go upstairs, wash my hair, adding a few drops of eucalyptus oil. I won’t think in any sentences but the words might drip and pool. I’ll feel clean.