The Stage. The Lights. The Magic.

Photo by Dininda Paranahewa

2 more days. It’s not enough.

Here I sit, on a Saturday morning, still bleary-eyed with sleepiness, with my mug of steaming milo sitting next to me, and I’m panicking.

Not in a hysterical, running-about-screaming sort of way. It’s a more insidious type of panic, lining your insides like a coat of paint which never really dries. It’s always fresh, it never really settles. It never screams out its presence but lurks around; nagging at you, reminding you discreetly that it’s always there. Waiting.

I’m panicking because of one word.

One word I am going to have to say in just 2 days. And it’s a word I have never been less ready to say.

Goodbye.

In just 2 days, one of the most gratifying experiences of my life will come to an end, and I will have to say that awful, awful word to both the experience itself and to every single person that made it happen.

Even though I’m going to try, I don’t think I can do justice to everything that’s happened in my life in the past 5 months. It’s too much. Too close to home. Too personal for me to be very objective about it. I guess that’s part of why it’s so special.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about…

On the night of the 1st of March 2009, Hamlet at Elsie’s Bar will close for business. And on the 2nd, I know I’ll be heartbroken that I will not be able to go back there again, to meet with my friends, my children, my family.

*      *      *

The Carver.

Wednesday morning at 5 am by curlytops

He carved. By profession. By character. Everything he did had an element of cleaving to it; a sense of tearing in two.

And he fascinated her. Interesting people always had an uncanny ability to lure her in and she knew she was caving, but she did so anyway. Not exactly a moth to a flame – although these people tended to be dangerous. She was more like a phoenix, reveling in the fire that simultaneously destroyed her and gave her new birth.

She sat in front of him, cross-legged like a child, and watched as he carved a small block of wood, carefully curling back and peeling away layers of solid as if it were clay. She wondered at the delicacy of the process, the detail, the care. Transfixed by the sight, she could almost feel the knife on her. Painless cuts whittling away confusions of the past, creating new wounds that she could not yet feel the sting of. But she would. She knew she would. She was waiting for it.

Insightful much?

 

Thanks to TMS, as always, for providing me with a fun 5-minute distraction from my current lack of literary inspiration.

Your Brain is 73% Female, 27% Male

Your brain leans femaleYou think with your heart, not your head Sweet and considerate, you are a giver But you’re tough enough not to let anyone take advantage of you!

What Gender Is Your Brain?

You know it’s time to worry when you read something like that and you don’t know whether to go “Damn straight!” or “Yeah right”.

:/

Mirror mirror…

Mirror, by audpod

Overdosing on Benadryl. Not the most glamorous way to go.

 

My mind keeps shutting itself down and I’ve literally drifted off about a hundred and fifty times today already. Stuffing my face with short bread biscuits in an attempt to keep awake. My jaws are on overdrive. But I’m still sleepy.

 

The long weekend was… long. Saturday and Sunday were busy – which I loved, strangely enough. I say this because, on an average day, I am just about the laziest human being on the planet. But these are not average days.

 

I feel as if I’m undergoing some sort of strange personality transplant. I have never been more confident, but I have also never known myself less. So here I am, flaunting this brand new person around without actually taking the time to know her.

Water

 

Courtney Cruz Shower, by PerryGallagher

 

It’s been a long slog home. Her shoes are caked with mud and she feels sorry for them, but not sorry enough to wash them. A job for the weekend, she tells herself. For now, it’s herself that she longs to clean.

 

She kicks off the shoes and undresses carelessly. A t-shirt hanging off the side of the bed. A bra with her jeans, crumpled on the floor.

 

The shower is extra hot. She hates the cold, she always has. She sits cross-legged on the floor of the tub, her head bent, almost as if in meditation. Her eyes downcast, she concentrates her vision on the water that drips off the edges of her eyelashes.

 

Not bothering to look up, her fingers slide blindly over the wall tiles, slippery with steam, to find the tap, which she turns up. Full.

Reality Bites

butterflies, by smile-d

 

The girl fidgeted in the heat of the afternoon. She was at her grandmother’s house for lunch with her parents and some other guests and she was bored. Grown-up shop talk didn’t interest her. She yawned, staring at the slow moving blades of the fan, trying to hang her vision on one and count how many rounds it made in a minute. She found she could never keep track of the one blade and after a while, she gave up.

 

Her eyes strayed towards the garden. It was massive – unusual of a house in the heart of Colombo. She had always loved it – loved running down the rolling hill which cut the garden in half, her hair streaming behind her; loved the pretty little arch off to the left, where she dreamed of getting married; loved the pepper plants whose black seeds she’d spend hours picking to throw in the two big ponds on either end of the grounds.

 

Most of all, she loved the huge old bow-tree that spread its branches like protective arms over almost the whole expanse of the garden. Its trunk was on the other side of the boundary wall, so it didn’t belong to them. She liked to think that it did, though. That it favoured their garden to the one in which it was planted and so leaned ever closer in their direction, arms holding out for what it could never really possess. She felt a funny kind of love for that tree and had spent countless moments staring at it from the balcony of her grandmother’s house, watching it as it presided over the garden, carpeting the grass with beautiful dried leaves. In a country with no seasons, she felt that it was always fall in her grandmother’s garden. On many an afternoon, she had been lulled by its rustled whispers and had slipped off to sleep, wishing she could understand what was being said.