#writteninthesand

[gentletides]

Autumn makes me fall in love with you Amber leaves fall, so softly to the ground crinkle under my clumsy feet, in leather boots a little too big. Everything feels a little bigger this this time of year, y'know? and I made smaller by the awe of it all. I think a lot, this time of year. The music blaring tinny, and crisp in my ears, turns to soft crooning - you always sing like that, rain or shine. See, you're all stormclouds against a pale blue sky, woodsmoke and pencil-stained fingertips, leather workboots, not steel toe-capped, ...I think of you, a lot, this year in particular. The autumn wind is alive. It comes in uneven breaths; a sigh... a weighty pause... and then: a summon. That fit of urgency, of purpose that rouses the trees into a maelstrom of passion. Its a kindling magic, makes you imagine, makes you believe - that perhaps it could drift you here, to me.

[gentletides]

I stare down at the overflowing box of nails in my hands held at arm's length, lest I prick myself raw, carefully, I turn it around - and oh, it has your name on it. I lower it to the floor This is not mine to hold.

[gentletides]

Tonight’s bath theme is green 🌿

[gentletides]

I begin typing messages to you - but that is the beauty about online messaging. Unlike in real life, in which my face, my expressions and my lips might betray my feelings - I’ve the opportunity to stop, backspace, and let things never be said. The opportunity, I have dubbed it, for cowardice.

So I will write them here. Because it is a half past one in the morning and my mind races with shattered thoughts. My heart bears heavy beneath a melancholy, sticky and sweet. I miss you. How can I miss someone I’ve never met?

I am terrified of being hurt by you. More and more, and the farther the intensities of my feelings grow, the concept sounds like a when, and not an if.

I am cowardly, and small, and unwilling to let myself be broken. So why, then, do I continue pulling in that direction? Why, then, do I orbit this hurt with a gravity I am clearly not trying hard enough to withstand?

Why can I not learn to be normal about you?

[gentletides]

I love you.

[gentletides]

From when I was a teenager and to this day, people ask; "why don't you want to be a mother?" and the inevitable follow-up: "how can you be so sure?" and I give, and have given, all manners of answers; Most tragically: that I've no idea if my health would allow me to conceive safely, and even were it to, that it surely would not allow me to parent well. Most confidingly: that my mental fortitude is a careful equilibrium, the likes of which I've spent a decade honing, and don't fancy that a child-shaped spanner in the works would improve upon. Most contestedly: that I do not possess the maternal instinct - I can enjoy my time entertaining children, listen so keenly, yet find again and again that motherhood is just not a song which sings to me. Most selfishly: that I want to travel, to be the protagonist of my own destiny. That I have bore the weight of chains long enough that, though this would be a blessing to many, I fear the chafing on my wrists would turn any gift too heavy prison-shaped.

And though all of these are fundamentally true... perhaps most truthfully I would answer... that I was born a mother. That amongst my earliest memories, between learning about the colour of the sky and the reason the rain falls, are those in which I am holding my mother's long curly mane back whilst she heaves just shy of the bathroom; are those in which, with hands impossible small and curved and soft, I use my entire weight to turn her on her side so she doesn't drunkenly asphyxiate in her sequin dress in the night; are those in which she cries and cries, mascara running down her cheeks, begging me to tell her she is not a "shit mother", and in which I intuitively learn two things at once; least of which is the fundamentals of what the word 'shit' means, and most crucial of which is that she needs to hear the answer 'no, no you are not'

She will cry another night yet, and afraid and bleary-eyed I will assure, and reassure, and plead for her to be okay, and in her dead eyes I will see that nothing I say or do can ever be enough. I will tuck her under my tiny little coat to sleep, burn my fingers learning how to use a stovetop I am too young to operate because I've eaten 59p powdered dessert mix four days in a row, discover that the broom-handle, which lies dusty by my bedroom door, can be used to turn off a fire alarm too tall for my little body to reach. I will get older, I learn the hard way which bathroom chemicals you cannot mix, learn which bits of the truth you say silently so that everyone stays smiling. I will take up running at fifteen, and run and run just to feel what it is to burn, and quieten my brain for fifty god-forsaken minutes, and eventually, I will run to England, still too young but feeling eighty-two, and learn what it is to slow down and stand... still.

I was born a parent. Now, I fancy I deserve my own childhood.

[gentletides]

I can’t look at a video of you for too long

because my heart weighs so heavy,

squeezes so tight.

Sometimes when your camera is on,

and mine is not,

I’ll perch right in front of the screen

and look at you. Really, really look at you

in as close to real time as you and I will ever get;

at the shape of your eyes when you smile,

the bend of your eyebrows when you think,

the curve of your mouth when you laugh.

I keep all these warm things to myself

and bask

in you

[gentletides]

I dreamt it was a summer night by the mountain range as we lay back on your truck. Above us, stars twinkled; so fucking many stars. More than I'd ever seen. And the crickets chirped, and the lightning bugs - oh, the lightning bugs, they glowed, mellow and fleeting and strange. And I, see, I turned my head to you, and I watched you watch, asked you "do you always tell the truth?" You frowned up, that way you do, eyebrows pinching together. "I think I do" and after a pause, "do you?" "Do you always say the things you are thinking?" "Hell no" And we laughed. Wickedly, and hilariously, and with glee. After, your turned your head to face me, "why do you ask?" I'd chewed my cheek. "I'm not used to heat at night time" and you looked perplexed, but indulged me. "Or the vastness of, all this" waving my hand up at the sky, and the range, the twinkling lights in the distance. "and everything is so big. And amongst all this, I suppose... suppose anything feels possible" I felt incredibly small even speaking such small truths - nothings, really, compared to the cataclysm of my feelings, but even then sensibility clawed up my throat, smothered my words. My voice, too, was small, when it whispered; a little dumbfoundedly, a little surprisedly, and a little devastatedly; "anything at all"

We lay there in silence, a long, long while. The nice kind; with the breeze, and the bugs, and the trees. I didn't think you'd speak again, really. Then you touched your little finger to mine - just a brush, at first, and a squeeze. When I awoke from my dream, I couldn't remember what the fireflies looked like. They evoked only dull, blurry shapes a'glow. Maybe that's what they look like, really, before you, out in the wilds.

I hope one day, I'll find out.