'It's The Way She Moves'

28/04/13

The room is quiet, dark and still

There is no sound or movement until

A small girl enters in dancing attire

She looks so somber but in her heart there’s a fire

A dream to succeed and so practice she will

As the moon shines down lighting every lace, every frill

She comes in the dark and the comfort of night

For in the day she’s criticized, try as she might

The others are arrogant and coated in tan

She works the hardest doing all that she can

Her feet sweep the floor in a majestic fashion

A floating perfection, the result of her passion

In the dark of the night her true colours show

An effortless plié, but no one will know

Conscience

27/04/13

Solitude. Isolation. I roam the countryside, searching through the bitter wilderness, watching. Waiting. My goal is to rid the world of the malevolence that secretes from every orifice, every pore of this living Earth, right to its core. Remove all trace of the ceaseless violence that plagues the inhabitants and haunts my subconscious. For once, I was one. A small, seemingly insignificant piece in their game, manipulated and twisted. Ordered to hurt. Although I simply obeyed I can never undo the injustice I caused, the fate I initiated, the destiny I created.

The abused and the wronged never forget, so I want to be remembered for a different reason: for love, for humanity, for salvation. So I venture on, tracking these new kind of villains and their monstrous plan of torture and treason. Details. Intricate details. Winding their way through loops, weaving and whirling a pattern so complex that even an insider can barely decipher direction. Betrayal is so taboo that it is punishable by worse than execution, a providence that I am certain to suffer in the face of success. But I must succeed. Failure is not an option with what’s at stake.

Faces surround me, enveloping my senses and incapacitating my being. The victims of my blind faith and cruel enslavement, the innocent who I once condemned to eternal damnation and for whom I now seek supreme redemption.

The Dirt Track

27/04/13

This was drawn from a picture I looked at in detail during a seminar.

I flicked through the photo album, hoping to gather some sense of my parents. They’d been so dedicated to raising me, yet I knew little of their lives before me. They never discussed their childhoods or adolescence, never indulged in stories of their youth. I had not pushed them to enlighten me, I was more concerned with my own life I guess. The album I had found whilst searching through the loft in their house – it was mine now, my inheritance, something I shouldn’t have received this young. They had always kept photos of me in albums, documenting their proudest achievement, but it surprised me to find one full of their memories. It wasn’t exactly hidden, just boxed separately from the other albums and covered in a layer of thick dust, which had clumped together in places. They clearly had never looked through it, which was strange considering the photographs had meant enough to save and preserve in an album.

The images were nothing unusual or extraordinary: a family birthday, a dog walk, school year photos, Valentine’s day, Christmas – the usual couple keepsakes. Rolling my eyes at the baby in the bath snapshot, I flicked to the next page. As I did, a photograph fluttered out and landed by my feet. Reaching down, I picked it up, tentatively grasping the edges – Mum hated fingerprints.

I was immediately drawn into the picture. It was mainly black, like the camera lens cap had been on when it was taken. But in the centre was a triangle of white, illuminating some of the mystery picture. The effect of this distant area was reminiscent of a black hole, drawing me further and further into the picture’s depths, wanting me to discover a secret that lay within. In the centre of the photo was a dirt track stretching into the horizon. On both sides, maize plants towered high blocking any view and any light from the path. The camera operator had stood in the track – possibly at its beginning, but the track seemed so desperately endless in both directions this could have been taken from any point on the dusty trail. I got a real sense of journey from the photo, like this was a pivotal moment of discovery on a massive quest. It seemed for once my parents had lived and had some sort of adventure before they’d had kids and settled. I liked to think they’d led full lives.

The scene was almost apocalyptic, like the answers or salvation lay in the light, the eye of the storm. I felt a real pull to the white triangle, a sense of destiny drawing me to its questionable source. Although I got an ominous feeling that no matter how long you walked for, you could never reach the light. I turned the photograph over, hoping for some written clue to date and set this picture. In the top left corner scrawled in tiny writing were the words, ‘And that’s how far I got’ and the date of my parents’ deaths.

The Dark

27/04/13

This is drawn from two weeks in my course. One in the first semester where I had to use punctuation creatively and I ended up writing this story but with one word sentences to build tension. Then in semester two, we were asked to write a paragraph revolving around a colour, so I chose black which was assigned to our group during the lesson.

Where there is no light, there are no shadows. No thief of your own identity glued to you. It’s easy to become unstable down here, scared into insanity by this blind hell. The sewers are not a natural dwelling for humans, we’re not built to survive this sort of terrain, to be visually numb. It’s chaos for the senses in this eternal night. The darkness invades our eyes, enveloping our optics and forcing our other senses to enhance for survival. Smell is a sense I could do with reducing, the fetid odours of waste in abundance singes my nostrils daily, the constant change in temperature and varying waste, meaning that getting used to the scent is impossible. Touch is not all that pleasant either. The tunnels are a labyrinth, a maze of cold stone walls ending and turning sharply, easily catching those with wavering memories. The stones underfoot are slimy, as if slathered in inky oil. Not that anyone could tell in this darkness. We’re so far below the ground, that during the day not even a sliver of daylight penetrates the blackness. You’d think that tendrils of sunlight could easily claw through the cracks in the stone compilations, but we had to fortify that in order to stay safe, condemning ourselves to a lifetime of darkness to maintain a life. And a human race.  

Weakness of the Night

26/04/13

The fatigue tugs at my eyes so early some nights. Even on days where I have done practically nothing, at least nothing to make me weary, nothing that requires exertion. The prescription lenses draw out every ounce of strength my eyes, but my eyelids can’t close. There is so much to do. I have nothing to do actually; I just fight sleep until I feel it is a respectable hour to concede defeat. I mean, a teenager, one with only a year left of adolescence no less, shouldn’t be closing their eyes before 11pm right? Regardless of the fact that I’m not out at some raging party or even watching a film with a friend. No. I’m lost in the Internet and the endless distractions it harbours. There’s no real escape from that pull. Until the tiredness focuses its attention on the rest of my being, those important limbs operating the instigator, the one forcing my body to stay awake by clicking keys and swiping through endless bright windows.

My eyelids rise slower and slower after each blink, and the tapping of my fingers becomes laboured. The lamp is no longer reducing the strain of the bright screen and my eyes shout at my brain for a ten-hour respite. I close my mac’s lid and ponder the day to come. What do I have planned? Is an alarm necessary? An alarm is always necessary - I could sleep forever.

But I don’t have forever to waste.