Week 14 - #1

           Succession

#1  She’s all ready for bed, though she still has a few hours before sleep.  Pajama bottoms, ratty tank top, freshly washed face, messy bun.  Facebook to check and laundry to do, and she’s the one to get it all done. 

“Did you not like my music?” she asks a roommate. 

A vague reply and a question in return. 

“No, I don’t care what we listen to.”  She finishes the conversation.  So not going there.

#2 She knows that she’s behind, and she’s pretty stressed about it.  So what does she do?  The headphones go in, and her project comes out.  She sits in front of it and works away.  She only stops every once in a while to pop some more food in her mouth.  Facebook is by her side, but she’s not paying much attention to it.  She swings from one end of the spectrum to the other – changing her face from deeply concerned (brows creased and biting her lip), to carefree (tapping her foot to the music and giggling at something on her computer screen).  Swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other. 

#3 Rushing to her shelf, she rustles through a stack of papers.  “Now this is getting annoying.”  Without being asked, she continues, “I can’t find my paper!” After checking a few loose papers, she grabs a stack and sits down with it, turning them furiously, stopping only to inspect and reject.  She pushes the stack from her lap, strewing it across her bed.  Her legs swing over the mattress and rest on the floor.  Her head falls into her hands and she sniffs. 

“Are you crying?” asks a roommate. 

“No.” 

“Yeah you are.” 

“No, this time I’m really not.”  She lifts her head from her hands to prove the fact. 

Messaging her temples, she sits for a few minutes before picking up a loose paper by her side.  “There it is!”

Prompt #64

The wind blows in my face, and gently breaks my resolve to stay in the fresh air.  Something gets caught in my hair, and I run my fingers through the strands to pluck it out.  A thorn.  The wind took it from its home and threw it at me, from where?  I retrace the steps of the wind to find out.

The tear-stained face of a child.  Most of the reasons that moves a child to cry are reasons that do not last long.  A scraped knee, a sudden burst of anger or sadness.  But not these tears.  These tears were not born from a childish passion or a foolish fancy.  These tears were birthed on the day the father walked out, and they will never stop falling.

The source of the thorn can’t be far now.  A winding dirt road will lead me to its mother.  The mother of a thorn must be bitter, bitter indeed.

The day he left, his wife fainted in surprise and shock.  How could she not know that he was spending his nights with another?  It was a holiday – ruined forever for her and her children.  He asked her to pretend for his sake, for the sake of the day. She refused, how could he think she wouldn’t?

The road is riddled with holes on my way to this thorn bush.  I stumble, and the winding road does not forgive my misstep.  My knees are bloodied, but I cannot stop.  My need to find the mother of the thorn lifts me gently from my knees, drives me, pushes me on.

He walked out, but it didn’t stop there.  Oh for the simplicity of a father who could not be found!  But no, torturous agony was there lot.  Miserable creature that he had become, his greatest pleasure was to make his own children suffer.  If their suffering meant his old wife’s suffering, then his goal was achieved.  Who can lose that much of their soul?  How can a heart forget?

My heart beats faster as I near a bend in the road, and smell that sharp and metallic smell.  Is it the thorn bush I'm looking for?  Or is it the blood oozing from my knees?

He is descending into the abyss every day, and every day I’ll continue to struggle with forgiveness.  His children will never be the same for it, and neither will his old wife.  Perhaps she will find love again – love as it should have been in the first place.  Or perhaps she will stay as she is – hoping for someone and attempting to please men, setting a poor standard for her children to live up to.  

The thorn bush is not a bush – it’s a tree.  The thorns are ready to release and find new homes, nestled in the flesh of others.  Burying themselves deep in the warm blood that gives life and the prospect of hope.  Birthing pain, and infection, and disease.  Why is this their lot, why do they perform this task?  I suppose it is because they are thorns.

Prompt #65

The box itself is cardboard – but a lively print decorates it’s surface to fool perspective buyers.  

Spread over the contents is a plastic bag that once held a trinket I bought in Gettysburg.  The trinket is gone, but the bag with colored pictures and words remains.

There is a stack of letters tied in ribbon.  I haven’t rid myself of them yet.  They are too heavy with memories for me to lift.

There is a dried daisy chain that always makes me smile.  She was so good at making these, then looping them around her friend’s heads.  Entwining hearts and weeds in one fluid motion.

Driftwood yes, from a beach I’ve forgotten.  How lucky I am to visit them often enough for them to run together in my mind.

A string of yellow beads, yellow being my favorite color once.  A thoughtful gift that lasted longer than the obsession of youthfulness.

These all tell of a little girl, pieces from her life.  She was innocent, happy, pure.  But those days are gone, forever perhaps.  Someday someone might come and put that sweet spirit back where it was before.  Not all of these things can be erased, the ocean breeze, the thoughts that accompany yellow.   Pieces, small and insignificant, but they are the pieces of a whole.

Prompt #63

It isn’t the hum-drum hours of work that we crave.  Minutes in a routine job pass slowly  -  sometimes agonizingly so. 

It isn’t the pleasant but forgetful hours of sleep that we think back on, though they are everything to a tired man.

Nor is it the moments we are forced to wait, and to be alone, forced into boredom.

It’s the moments we spend with the people that mean something to us, these people cause an hour to take on the heaviness of eternity.  In the hours when words are said that we’ll never forget – it’s those hours that we long for and hope for.  It’s with an excess of these moments a soul grows fat and thankless.  It’s without these moments that some grow restless with longing, starving for affection and fulfillment. 

Prompt #62

Words are small.  They can be tangible or intangible things, carved on the walls of Mayan temples in the form of men and demons, carved on stone tablets to instruct a nation, whispered from one set of lips to a chilly ear on a November night, shouted across the lawn, accompanied by projectile objects.  Just words.  

What about the difference between a “no” and a “yes”?  Only one letter more in the second word, though the letters are all different alphabetically.  They are pretty far apart in the dictionary, but when a question is asked one of these two is generally given in answer – in one form or another.  They are very similar.  Very much the same.

So when he asked and I said “no,” not much change should have taken place.  He took more words than usual to say “love me” and I said “no,” abruptly in contrast.  Then he pretended to have never asked, and I pretended not to care.  Our habit of trading words lessened markedly.

He still thinks about me, of that I’m sure.  When he falls, he falls pretty hard.  I still think of him, knowing that I pushed him, knowing he’ll be alright.  We would never have been happy together, he should’ve known that.  But he did know that, so why did he even make the demand he did?

My bed is half-empty, just the way I like it.  It sure didn’t take me long to move back into the mindset of ‘alone forever.’  It’s the mindset that fits my head, and it’s the safe and comfortable place to be.  

From Mayan temples to my half-filled bed, words took me there and back again.  Around and around, dizzyingly and deftly.  Words are not small, they are infinitely grand.  Crashing kingdoms, corrupting regimes, they’ll always be there to change us and for us to change.