My favourite things

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

I scooped up a stone and threw it violently into the ocean - there was no skipping, just a clunky splash, and then silence.

Bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens.

I sat myself down on the pebbled beach. The grey sky pressed down on me and the wisps of wind ripped through my jacket like invisible knives. It looked as though it could rain - as though it needed to. It seemed as though the sky was holding on, it's knuckles pressed tightly together, yearning to just let go. The water lapped nervously, anticipating the storm, and I sat stubbornly on the shore. I was refusing to leave.

-When the dog bites, when the bee stings -

Maybe I should go back, I thought, as the approaching clouds grew darker and the wind blew harder. No. Instead I hunched myself forward, wrapping my arms around my knees, telling myself I wasn't afraid. The first bullets fell from the sky, hitting the lake like - like - drip drip drop little April Showers. Murderous showers. Du du de du du de da de du - de de da du de da du de de dum. It was December and the rain was cold as ice.

Brown paper packages 

A raindrop rolled down my cheek like a tear. Or maybe it was a tear - I wouldn't know any more. The rain started to hiss, splattering around me, sounding like a melancholy New York city. I felt glued to the stones - there was no way I could leave now. I had to wait it out.

tied up with strings

"Martin! MARTIN!" It seemed as though the wind itself was calling me. Wait - "Martinnn! MARTIN IS THAT YOU?" - it wasn't the wind. I was shaking. I refused to turn around. I was in the storm - I was the storm. Thunder growled overhead and lightning flashed as though on que, illuminating the lake and the desperation it appeared to be hiding. "Martin?" Something like an arm touched my shoulder, and I sat rigid as a rock. Perhaps I had become a pebble. I was the same as all the others on the beach. They'd never know which was one was me. They could throw me into the ocean - clunky splash, silence - and they still wouldn't know.

I was being dragged to my feet. I looked down at my hands, noticing now that they were covered in blood. Mingling with winter's rain and dripping maliciously onto my boots... every part of me was covered in blood.

These are a few of my favourite things. 

Emptying my brain

I tremble as I observe the world, so splendidly horrific in everything it presents to us.

“Why write? Why read? So pointless. So…unnecessary.”

I reach out a hand on an icy night, and note the billons of cells combined together to create its nervous whiteness. I watch the knuckles flex, and I feel a pointlessness so strong it physically strikes me. My hand snaps back. Why have hands? Why have anything at all? Why think these thoughts?

With imagination there is everything and anything. With reality we are limited: we are held back by particles, laws, morals, and existence, but with a story the possibilities are infinite. There is an exquisite, uncontrolled power in a writer; they can veer one way then sprint another, before taking to the sky like a firework and exploding the universe, ripping out the fabric of time and space - if they so wish. They can coax a wimblowicket out of its dusty hollow, whatever that may be. They can make love blossom in the most unlikely places, or they can paint misery into the eyes of characters we then come to think of as real.  As a writer you have the whole world and more at your fingertips; you have time, space, reality, surreality, emotion, life and death to knead with. You can dance and play with everything we know and everything we don’t…you understand this world is splendidly horrific. You love this beautiful pointlessness.

Others may pretend to know. Professionals present themselves as smooth, knowledgeable and damn smart – smarter than these writer lunatics. But they are just as damn stupid and damn scared as the rest of us. They will never admit they know that hollowed out feeling, as though they are capable of nothing and can do nothing to make anything right – because everything feels wrong. Writers can write what is right; they can sculpt what is wrong. They can make peace with futility.

You tell me it is pointless – well tell me, when you glance into the obscene blackness that is the sky tonight, do you understand? We are on a rock hurtling through a void, but yet you stand here, as still as anything, watching black water lap over black rocks in this black night. Where were you in the daylight hours? There was colour then, I promise. The rocks were grey, the sky blue, and the water as colourless as crystal. I wish you’d seen more than this shadowy black. Have we just never seen our world in what I will call “day”? Are we believing black when colours do exist? Perceptions, determinations, brains, infinity. I am blown away with possibility, yet chained and calloused with the clasps of your damned reality.

Madness. What a strange, strange word. How can one not be mad, when you regard seriously our position? We turn our backs on the inevitable and smile; we sweat and labour until our eyes close for the last time, never to reopen – and even then, on the borderline, we will have no idea. And yet, despite all this, you still believe my words are pointless. Their words are pointless. Their reflections of this stupid, bewildering, terrifying group of existences are to be discredited as nothing? There is never nothing…nothing comes of nothing. I am stepping forward into nothing and yet I know I shall fall into the hands of something, and perhaps something shall save me, or perhaps it shall not.

Never shall it mean nothing. Because never shall anything mean anything. We are running in the dark – we always were, we perhaps always will be…if dark can mean anything to us at all, can mean anything to us who know nothing.