Thursday, August 30, 2007

Time Warp


Sometimes, usually in the dead of night, a cold clammy fear comes over me. A shock wave, jolting me out of my near slumber, sending my eyelids shooting into their sockets and my heart into a clenched fist punching against my breastbone. A time warp. Two years of healing gone in a millisecond and I'm back there. Sometimes, these have felt like the longest years of my life and other times I imagine I've just been dreaming. That I could wake up, pad downstairs, push open the frosted glass door to the kitchen, using my free hand to gently manoeuvre Robbie and Dillon out of the way, help myself to soda bread and stare sleepily out of the french windows at the dewy morning whilst the kettle whistles. If I was dropped back into that life now, I would know exactly what to do. But another girl now pads down those stairs, opens the frosty door and stares sleepily out at the dewy morning. And two years ago, this great big hand reached down from the sky and plucked me out of that life bubble, piercing it's protective film as it pulled me miles into the sky and then released me, crashing down to earth, sticky and wet and broken. But I've been learning to blow life bubbles of my own since then and I can nearly make one big enough just for me to live in comfortably. But every now and then time warps and I fear the cold, clammy hand reaching for me in the dead of night.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Weightless Wonderland

Staring out of the window as the plane leaves Copenhagen, I am surprised to see a lone house, strong and sturdy on a remote island, surrounded by nothing more than miles of swampy marsh. Carved around it in a crescent moon shape, appears a man made moat, ensuring perhaps that should any would-be-visitor actually manage to reach this house far from harbour or road, the moat would prove one challenge too far. Who would want to live in a place like this, I wonder? The plane moves higher and breaks the mists of cotton, I look down and envision myself bouncing from cloud to cloud, under the gaze of the pink, half moon. A child's "weightless wonderland"... the Care Bears lived in the clouds didn't they? In a place called Care-a-Lot. And if you climbed up the Faraway Tree, you reached wondrous lands like this didn't you?

I rather like looking down from this surreal, fairytale land upon my real life below. Seeing it from this perspective, I realise that I am but a tiny speck in a great,vast, Universe. And everywhere, people are going about their lives as best they can. People have been born and died today, married and divorced, eaten too much or starved and all manner of things that I couldn't even begin to describe because I have no comprehension of their lives and the World that they live in. Tomorrow, I'll go back to my small existence as a black speck in a corner of an office in London, England. But I hope that the bigger perspective stays with me for a while longer.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

2030 Vision

Hello people. Have been frantically scribbling in notebooks, on bits of paper and on old filofax calendars whenever the mood has taken me, but have had no time to transfer thoughts blog... so in the meantime, I came across this on a new support website for people in their 20s and 30s. This article rang a few bells for me and judging by our predominant topic of the search for true love it will for a lot of you too. Take a look! In the meantime, we'll be back soon!

http://ezine.2030vision.org.uk/home.php?page_id=51

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

The Love Plague


As I turn the handle quietly and pop my head round to mouth goodbye, a finger shoots to his lips to warn me against speaking. There was a time when this gesture would have bothered me, the presumption that I'm a) not sensitive enough to know when speech maybe inappropriate and b) his shameless prioritisation of the woman at the end of the phone line. But it doesn't rile me. I wave goodbye, shut the door and descend the familiar cream carpeted stairs with its worn-in grey smudges. I am relieved and a little sad. Relieved that I play no part in his complicated triangles with girls who are engaged or cohabiting with another. Sad because this type of liaison is rife... spreading through the streets of London as quickly as the great plague of 1665; leaving in its wake bubonic hearts piled on top of each other, feebly beating their blood into the gutters and drains - seeping into our ecosystem, spreading, spreading... Love, if you can call it that, has become another victim of our careless, throw-away society. People are quick to fall into it, quick to fall out of it and think nothing of running a few different variants of it together... why? Do we think that keeping our options open will allow us to find as near to perfection as we can? Or do we do it simply because we live in an era where we can? A time where having your cake and eating it is a rite of passage? I don't know. But I want no part of it anymore. I do not want to be a variant of love for someone; I want to be their love. And I'm quietly confident that somewhere on this planet, there is a soul that thinks like me. That wants a simple yet complex love, exclusive, hardy - that will weather the test of time. A deep love which each party knows is worth fighting for even when surface love is temporarily sleeping because of strife or over-familiarity. I still believe that somewhere there is a man that wants that too.