05/05/11 - 2

The sodium light of street lamps only reaches so high, and where its luck runs out tower blocks are stained the blue of old photographs. You’ve a picture of your mum standing under a wash of that very same colour, looking happy and young and not quite the person you recognise. Or perhaps there’s one of you as a child, at a beach or the park, ruddy cheeked and sticky. It’s a shade that only seems to come out in transitions; not a colour to be poured from a tube, but one watered down with passed time.

May 05 2011 • 01·24 am • 1 note
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05/05/11

I feel far more tired than I ought to, given how little work I’ve accomplished today. If I was a physicist I’d invent a particle for this, something to fill the gap between what I know I’ve done and what my body’s convinced happened. My personal Higgs boson’s not quite the God particle, admittedly. Perhaps the Joseph particle’s a better name. One of those faintly secondary biblical characters, at any rate; someone you might play in a nativity as a kid. The Judas particle might be closer to the point, actually - I certainly feel like my limbs are traitors.

May 05 2011 • 01·13 am
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04/12/10

Someone told me that the sky and the sea are never the same colour. Why they should be, I don’t know - different states of matter, the two, different purposes and depths. One is finite but clouded, trenched and furrowed and unknowable. And clearly this is true of the other, but the fact that it is clear counts for so much. Look at a puddle, clouded by sediment, and then think of space in these terms, and the possibility of some cosmic pothole arises. Perhaps we are looking not at the water but the grit, the trees not the wood.

December 04 2010 • 10·49 pm • 3 notes
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05/09/10

I’m on the front step, lit by streetlamps. Everything is orange. I have a fag in my hand, and its ash is littering my coat. Over the road there’s a piece of foil caught in the gate, and when the wind catches it it flutters at me in morse. I’m not sure what it’s saying, but it seems important, so I write it down in the snow. Where the light hits phone cables they shimmer like cobwebs, and I imagine the pole they meet at is a bird-eating spider, and that that is why there are no pigeons around today.

September 05 2010 • 11·32 pm
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26/08/10

The scar on my right knee is a ghost of the fresh wound gracing my left. A remnant of childhood all but forgotten with advancing age and more pressing bodily concerns. This new lesion is as sinister as its location, a raw disc of flesh of perhaps two inches in diameter, rich red and sticky to the touch. Fifteen years separate the injuries, but the specific soreness of a scab stretched over an often-used joint is as familiar as my last meal or the décor of my room. I flex the skin slowly and savour the feeling: searing white anachronism.

August 26 2010 • 12·03 am • 1 note
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21/06/10

20 years of life and I’ve only just noticed that the sun and moon are the same size in the sky, despite the discrepancy of scale and distance between them. I’ve been living a lie! It’s like seeing the moon in the daytime, which forever feels like you’re in a film set somewhere far far away, as opposed to on our bit of rock in the blue, too much like home to be exceptional. It’s the pink glow of fingertips held in front of bedside lamps for the first time, vinegar with baking soda, all those other boring miracles. Be amazed!

June 21 2010 • 11·15 pm
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14/06/10

The last of the sunset fades as we spin, the motion transforming watery sepia into paper-smooth indigo, like a pale gown trailed through clay. Papercut trees line my window, and beyond then nothing marrs my view. I’ve exchanged my new city for the one I grew up in, just for a short while, and though to some this old home is vast enough for a lifetime’s activity, I feel a slow dread building at the thought of a summer here. The bulk of my belongings remain in this bedroom, but my mind is wandering the streets of somewhere else, restless.

June 14 2010 • 11·13 pm
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07/06/10

As the screen faded and the lights rose, and I could once again make out my form among the ranks of seats and bodies, I found myself regretting the speed of the passage of time, the way in which we cannot always find ourselves in the middle of things. The anticipation of future misfortunes and happinesses and the imperceptible distances separating them placed me suddenly on the bottom rung of a high ladder, the next step as yet unknown. 70 years of fictional existence had just been compressed into two idle hours of my own, and I felt the discrepancy sorely.

June 07 2010 • 01·16 am
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01/06/10

I find the Tarot an attractive prospect - and palm reading, crystal balls and all that. It’s not that I believe in them as powerful systems, rather that I relish the opportunity for no-holds-barred introspection that they provide. The fun isn’t so much in the prophecies and suggestions given over as it is in the impressions that these things have been based on, the character traits from which it has been divined that you’d be the type to lust over a tall-dark-handsome stranger or to be worried about your finances. Am I dressed cheaply, are my red nails too romantic?

June 01 2010 • 12·54 am • 3 notes
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31/05/10

Saturday was idle, occupied with papers and cooking, and we fell asleep almost instantly when the time came. On Sunday morning we got the first bus away from here, cooing at  unfamiliar shop signs and tower blocks as we sped towards the terminus of the route. Once there, we took the next bus to arrive, and repeated the process two or three times. Hours later, firmly embedded in south London’s sparse tangle of transport paths, we caught sight of sunset from between two houses, and murmured how lucky we are to live somewhere so picturesque, so wide and animatedly vacant.

May 31 2010 • 02·52 pm
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breakingnight asked: Do you write longer fiction?

Kind of half-arsedly? I want to. If I could do anything with my life, that’s what I’d do. I might start posting longer things soon. Thank you for reading me!

May 31 2010 • 02·20 pm

22/05/10

I love the smell of my room when I’ve been away for a short while. The flowers on the sill will have wilted a little, and perhaps a few petals will be shed when I lean past them to draw the curtains aside and push open the windows. This new breeze will loosen the fine dust from my bookshelves, the arrangement of volumes slightly foreign after a brief exile, and the memory of my last night spent here will settle as these motes do. My sheets will feel crisp and slightly damp, and I’ll sink into them cold and sure.

May 22 2010 • 05·13 am
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20/05/10

I sat under the tarpaulin, drink and fag in hand, and counted the bricks in the courtyard wall. I got to 44 before I needed to take another sip and drag, and in blowing the smoke out I effectively blocked my own view. It was warm, and the wall removed the possibility of any breeze, so the smoke hung there, drifting. It picked up the eddies and currents like dusted fingerprints, and dissipated slowly. I swivelled in my chair and turned to speak to you, but you were occupied with someone else, so I followed my grey breath’s unsure path instead. 

May 20 2010 • 04·16 am • 2 notes
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17/05/10

Thin clouds spill across the sky like split mayonnaise, distilling dusk light and making the concrete of the patio look damp. I sit on the bottom step and tread the lawn between my toes, a novel dangling from my fingers. I used to give myself to over books wholly, and devour complete chapters in minutes, but I lost this skill late in adolescence. A faint film of dirt sticks to the balls of my feet, and the feeling is nearly unpleasant, as if pushing a thumb through overripe pear when expecting the soft give of firmer flesh. I shiver indulgently.

May 17 2010 • 06·31 pm
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11/05/10

Sat in my chair so long that the room’s grown cold. Wish I’d remembered to learn to like shivering at some point during the winter. All my blankets are strategically strewn over the various coffee stains I managed to get on my sheets whilst reading last night, so clearly I can’t use one of those. Having to make do with an extra pair of tights and a bottle of raspberry vodka, which I’m not particularly fond of. It’ll replace the creme de menthe as the reserve drink, for when everything else dries up, I suppose. It’s an important job, that.

May 11 2010 • 02·52 am
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