what Emma wrote.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
I miss writing. I miss writing for me or writing for an audience. I miss the toll of editing, of hesitating over each word and comma and connotation, wondering if they accurately depict my intentions. I miss being critiqued, judged, condemned and praised. I miss being challenged and vulnerable and daring.
My promise to myself is this: my graduation present to myself will be writing classes.
It seemed a rare thing for a girl of sixteen to decide that letter writing was a necessary part of her unstructured life. Where her time was otherwise spent online, engaged, posting and sharing, her letters were uninterrupted and unsent.
She had decided to create a dedication. Whilst each attempted resulted in little more than a page or two of scratches, she considered them an ode to those around her. She had not quite thought through the process, and many letters became repetitive and tedious. But she persisted rather unfazed, sure that her intentions would say more than her overuse of poorly strung metaphors ever could.
She had managed to write to the boy she had lost her virginity to, and his best friend who had remained in her life for a while later. She wrote to the girls from her old school, quoting their old Alma Mater as though it were visionary. She even cried as she wrote to her brother, although she never entirely understood why.
With all of the creativity and mysteriousness of a teenage girl, she placed the letters in a box, and thinking herself brilliant, slid them beneath the four poster bed she had inherited. For months they waited, hidden under layers of dust and darkness and odd socks she had kicked off in the night.
She never posted those letters, deciding she preferred to write them rather than deliver them. Instead that box eventually was shifted out from under the bed and down to the green council bin by the garage door. And at the time, she didn’t think twice on the matter.
Memoirs.
Often I found myself compelled to write letters to the people in my life. This was not limited to friends and families but instead to influences. The girl who uninvited me from a new years eve party that she wasn’t hosting received one equally as long as the sister who I had shared a room with for the majority of my life.
These letters were inherently positive, or at least I attempted for them to be. Mostly they spoke of specific memories and fond moments. On occasions they spoke of hardship, but only as a path to happier thoughts. The letters were never long, perhaps due to their lack of genuine substance, but in spite of this I persisted in writing them. On occasion I would add a second page at a later date, addressing the words of the first, making amendments.
I still don’t quite know what I thought might happen with those letters. That perhaps, in my absence, if found, one may distribute them, whilst still respecting my privacy to not read them all. I was hopeful to say the least. I just needed to be sure that nothing in my life went unsaid, and that when all was said and done, I’d left the world yellow.
In a small box beneath my bed were a series of letters. Each letter was scrawled on yellowed paper, folded over four times and had a name allocating the recipient in light blue ink. I had developed an obsession and this seemed the most logical manner to express it.
My death seemed both imminent and unpredictable. Truthfully, this fact remains unchanged in my life, although for entirely different reasons. The characters of my life kept dying. Jamie Sullivan was terminally ill and Corrie Mackenzie was shot. John Barton killed himself, as did Neil Perry. Sirius fell behind the curtain, and Annie Wilkes suffered a fractured skull, although that wasn’t exactly undeserved. Death seemed the constant, and thus mine must be nearing.
Each day I died a dozen times. With slit wrists and jumping off cliffs. At the hands of the man who offered me a ride to school while I waited at the bus stop or weapons of mass destruction. From the lump near my clavicle that required specialist appointments, and the forcefully demanding waves of the surf. And always in my sleep. Each day, I knew I would die.
I wasn’t scared, well not of death. To me, it was inevitable, a necessary plot point for story progression. I understood myself not to be the protagonist and therefore became determined to succeed in my minor role.
My fear focused on the remaining characters, and their plot that would outlive my own. I was petrified of the notion that their story may continue with my motives left unclear. Instead of allowing this, I decided to leave an epistolary influence. A series of letters, each with one recipient, and consisting of one single sided page. Concise ramblings.
To each I wrote in love. The simple form of love understood by a supporting role, without the complexity or development often reserved for major players. The idea that any could arise of a morning, myself nothing more than a plot hole in their developing series, had began to haunt me. My yellowed pages, often written as I sat by the local river, became my solace.
I did not wish to die, although these morbid musings may sound otherwise. I just wanted a guarantee that my last words, whenever they may be, were of love.
Eighteen months left before my great escape. Still looking for the little things to enjoy while I wait, although they are starting to feel inconsistent and allusive.
Therapy.
Available in many forms. For me, it has most recently appeared in the weight of eight garbage bags, filled with my former possessions. Hauling them over my shoulder, I felt the release as they tumbled down the local charity bin shaft.
I need to feel new, just as much in how I present myself as in who I am.
panacea.
An open package,
lined with chalk.
As I inhale,
waxen cheeks,
and the reassuring trickle
of freshly reddened lips.
My death approaches in a forthright manner. It knows nothing of subtlety or mercy. It is turbulent, demanding and impatient. It rusts the engines that once thrusted me through the motions, my motivation to persist. It claws at my barriers, exposing the vulnerability within before ripping at it with an unrelenting force. It is unyielding.
My death approaches with quiet stealth. It lingers, gazing through the open shutters, witnessing my manoeuvres. It remains, gaining familiarity as it camouflages beneath my many hesitations. It comforts me as my security tightens, and soon I begin to breathe deeply. It begins, and I am free falling.
My death approaches at every terminal.
Today I explored caves, abseiled down rock face and climbed the side of a cliff to watch the sunset over the mountains.
Not even storms can ruin this place.
the back green.
We sat on the hill at the edge of the field, behind the silver metal benches that each school seems to have. We were careful not to touch them as they radiated with the heat of the sun overhead. It was my first time having ever moved schools and I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience. The greatest benefit of my new schooling grounds was the abundance of grass, with several fields as well as a small garden. Whilst my previous school had my heart, and my name embossed in brick in the square courtyard that dwells between the old heritage buildings, it severely lacked in nature. There were community fields nearby, and facilities that made up for the harsh concrete we were provided.
So here we were, sitting. We knew each other enough to talk freely, and had I known you would one day leave me crying on a bus without explanation or sincerity, I probably would have chosen to have spent that time alone and undisturbed. Instead, I pondered aloud as we gazed over the hills of suburbia ahead. Beyond the trees which stood between us and some unfriendly looking barbed wire fencing, built to protect the school from break ins and burnt out cars (which had previously appeared on the fields), the land glazed with green. Trees sprung from the pond lands which crawled behind the houses, hiding weatherboard walls and tiled roofs.
“It could almost be picturesque I suppose, if it wasn’t for the power lines that are too large to be hidden,” I commented.
“I would say it still looks nice,” you replied in short. After a moment’s consideration I decided to agree as I knew it would be the easier response. Truthfully, I think I realised that whilst our view may be the same, what we saw was entirely different.
