Perfected :: Her Body :: Greek Necessity :: Deep Throats :: Scrolls

On Impermanence. I may not have spoken to her in months, I may have abandoned her at Edinburgh Bus Station with barely a word of goodbye, but my first instinct is still to shelter that little Moomin-faced girl who has somehow become a mother. Our lives have taken such different directions that I honestly don’t know what place my life holds for her, or her’s for me. I never quite saw it, to tell the truth. A pale, purple-haired, punked out girl with her combat boots and glitter, and a bespectacled geek, sheltered from the damp autumn air in a thick tweed coat. Most of my wry academic references, stuttered out over furtive cups of coffee in the sixth form cloakroom, sailed right over her head. Over the months a pink spiked bracelet hung from my slim wrist next to the heavy silver watch with its Roman numerals, and the short nails grew long and glittery red. Shorn dark hair as short as a boy’s was spiked with wax and gelled, dramatic wings of black eyeliner swept beyond wire-frame glasses. A skinny, mealy-mouthed boy he is, not my choice of a life partner at all. Eyes as big as saucers, giving him a strange Gollum-look on his pale, fine-boned face. The warning signs were scrawled across the sky in neon lettering when I left. Jealous, possessive, suspicious of the odd, incestuous nature of our little group that drew us into each other’s arms once in a while. He came home with his friends to find his flat filled with the scent of burning herbs, the cat curled up against the altar. Three thin young women, fizzing with magic and life and being young enough to get away with murder, on an estate that made it a distinct possibility. Drunken, open-mouthed kisses, sloppy and wet, usually bringing the ever-present bout of flu that haunted the corners of our sixth form common room. It wasn’t sex, just the intensity that happens when four girls of varying orientation spent day in and day out talking about everything and nothing and then swigging back warm beer from dusty bottles in some old rock club in the back streets of Liverpool. I liked women. That much was clear, from my disdainful looks at any man drunk enough to want to touch me. Lucy did not, although she played along for a while, proclaiming her alternative lifestyle long before the rest of us. Drooling over Courtney Love in an overt way I envied, fumbling in a bathroom in a nightclub with a women whose face she would instantly forget. Skye and Kendra slipped their velvet soft hands against each other and kissed before going back to their respective boyfriends. But we left, and they did not. Before the year was out, Skye’s belly was swollen with child and I had said a none-to-fond farewell to the last shreds of my innocence. Kendra had the sharp point of a knife at her throat before any of us could stop the man who still claims to love her. My heart was ripped out, first by one woman and then another, and I came home to nurse my wounds, grow out my hair and see if anything had changed. The obscure literary references kept coming and they still do. Even now, when my hair tumbles down onto my shoulders in a mass of red curls, and a slim black collar fastens itself around my neck, the words when they fall from my lips are cerebral, acidic, biting. So sharp I could cut myself, caustic wit the only self-defense I have ever been proficient in. I think, in many respects, I am still the girl she knew. The intervening years can only change a person so much. All it took was a comment made in passing by a mutual friend and my fingers slipped and slid across silver keys. Texting, because I don’t want to hear her voice haunting me from the other end of the line, a weighty chastisement heavy on her lips. And of course, partly because calling her would boost my already levitating phone bill sky high… She was my coven sister, my blood-sister, my friend. That changed, but when she falls I will still catch her. Part of me, most of me, thinks this madness. I screamed until my voice grew hoarse that I was their friend and not their counselor, that it was not my job to piece back together the broken shards of their lives. I still think that I know best. Maybe it is my superiority complex and not my emotional masochism that bids me to return. But I stated earlier today what I state now. If that clinging, possessive boy lets his white-hot rage escape him, my home is open to mother and child. ______________________________ we have come so far :: it is over

Accomplishment :: The Moon :: Toga :: Night Flower