I have so much I want to say so much, but nothing comes out. I’d like to be able to explain but I’m at a loss. How do I explain the inexplicable? Something is happening and I don’t know what, something is different, and I don’t know why. It’s all changed, its tricky. I opened my mouth again and still nothing and only silence, just a bad taste like metal perhaps the taste of words, perhaps dying in my mouth. A whole vocabulary lying dead and bleeding in my mouth and I can’t express it. It feels like I am drowning and suffocating in spit and silence my silence. That’s what they want eh…!!!! I am defeated defeated defeated. There I have said it, not out of my mouth not yet, but out of my head. In here in the boarded-up entertainment centre of my mind. The voices come and go, drifting colliding with thoughts and blurred memories, it gets busy in here noisy whispering hurting bits and pieces, fragments of things I am trying to wrestle with. Peace at last, I feel the dwindling rays of the sun on the one side of my face and watch the wind blow the fallen leaves across the moors.
Sitting here seeing the words the fragments of my mind working hard to dismiss them as they rip through to find a way out. Something has happened, a shift. I look at the sheep their faces staring at me and watch them graze across the field making up languages as they ate. I tried to think they were trying to talk to me, communicating with me. They stand In front of me ones, twos sometimes three’s, chewing, staring me in the face. Did they know something I didn’t? I took pics and so I could remember their faces and then I might see what they are saying to me. I must keep walking.
Sounds change, I hear the trickling of water in its desperate effort to cascade over rocks and fall into the waters that are the Bronte falls. I stop and observe the flow and notice it has only one way to go and has nothing to fight it’s way down no other agenda other than to keep a constant flow to run its length along its tributaries, fresh with nothing added, pure.
I feel small naked, vulnerable and alone, something is happening, and I don’t know what, something a life of not only of body but of fur dies. What is seen, what is spoken, the shape of things the architecture is all breaking down in those fragments in my mind, fading eroding in ways I can’t explain. It is just an ache a feeling in my gut and I know it to be true because I was there. How can I put a feeling in words that can express that ache that yearning to be heard? Can you hear it….
Do I belong in this time, now time, or is my mind telling me of another agenda? I go along and survive in the cracks in the gaps between things. Somethings just can’t be explained but are still there in the cracks and the gaps. I lie down where one side of my face is in the earth and the other is looking up into the sky where the sun is shining and I can get lost and where one day I can sleep and never wake up, where I’ll be safe, when who I am, where I am, and what I am will not matter, where I won’t be haunted by a past that made me but is no longer there. I stop and feel the reality of the wind brushing pass my cheek and for now I feel strangely connected to all that is around me, the air the trees and the birds and bees, and listening to the bird song. The heather swaying in the breeze. Now my feet are touching the rubble the rocks in the path that leads me now back to the start, and I breathe, free….!!!!
I follow the path that is rugged and changes in texture and material, just like the jigsaw of my mind. I wrestle with what’s real. Things pass me by, fields of heather with sporadic trees and the sheep grazing. People in their bubbles of family and couples and the faithful dog walking by their side. Then my mind wanders into the depths of the cracks bringing me closer to those that hurt. Getting closer so close I can almost touch them smell them feel them fear them, so alive I can almost reach them, coming close, so close. I drift away and crumbling evaporating and unravelling, fragmenting In front of me, and the space and hurt they leave behind is almost too much to bear, but I must go on. Seconds, minutes, time passing me by.
Now back in the warmth within four walls, the hissing of the kettle brings me back to the here and now and reminds me of who I am. The fragments in my mind now fusing together ensuring I see the whole picture and can reassure that little girl, Pauline Sharp she is safe, loved and believed.
I am the heart beat the beginning the middle and the end of my story. I just need to keep it beating.
