Running Away

I could hear the wind rustling the trees behind the beats of my headphones. Somewhere in the dark, things are still moving, still breathing.

I set off for this run about eight - night had already fallen over London and the winter cold descending on to the people and pavements below. I could have stayed in and waited for sleep to take over me but I couldn't bear the conscious hours before that happened.

You want to make it more painful. More painful.

It is about two degrees out tonight and I can feel the cold tightening its grip around my arms and legs, gnawing particularly at my ankles. This will keep me busy until bedtime and it'll help me to forget about the issues wringing my neck.

Block it all out - the memories of events you don't want to believe have happened.

It's easier to think about the pace of my run. I clocked in forty minutes on the usual five miles last time. I should be able to clock in another forty...or if not less. The headlights of cars coming in the opposite direction blind me at intervals and I find myself constantly having to readjust myself to the darkness.

You know you can't handle it. It's all flitting about in your mind. Flashbacks and glimpses...I can feel the anger and the upset flooding into my mind

I decide to turn down a road I don't normally take. I probably shouldn't be taking an alien route but I hope it'll take me a longer time to complete which will mean less time sitting on my own thinking about...everything. I can see it all, feel it all...

You know it's all there. Feel it.

I can't feel my legs. It's really cold.

It's there. You can't run away from it.

I'm not sure where I'm going now. I think I've taken a wrong turn. I can't get out.

It'll always be there. The pictures, the feelings, the...

It all needs to go the fuck away.

I'm lying on the pavement. My hands and knees grazed from the fall. I'm seeing stars and realise that I've hit my head on the way down. I can't get away from it all - I'm now sitting on the pavement, in the dark, on my own, thinking of everything I've been trying to run away from. I lean against the fence behind me and wait for the pain to pass. Cars rattle by in the mean time and I watch them disappear around the bend of the road; just makes me wish moving on was as easy as changing direction. I finally get up and make my way home, tired and tearful.

Like Cold Air

Like breath in the cold
it doesn't stay to hold your warmth.
It goes lightly into the air
tip toeing away
with every glassy exhale.

The nights turn in on itself
breaking shallow roofs with delves
and shudders of winter winds
turning stone into ice
with what's left being pined
and lost
upon hands of mistrust.

Can you wait?

There is no direction or goal in mind. Just wandering walks through this haze. I don't think there is much to expect, or even think about. I just need to know that you can wait. Can you wait?

Ironically, time is no longer an element. It is just a measurement we use to give us something to gauge our lives by so as to provide us with some guidance and a concept of place and events. With the problems and the haze I face, there is no time - there are no milestone of events or landmarks tangible enough to talk about. There's just space - wandering, directionless space. But yet I keep asking: Can you wait?

We can't hold this together without time on our side. Time isn't here, time isn't something we'll get back. All we have are lost opportunities and missing wholes of our being just because we started off lost to begin with. I would ask again, "Can you wait?" but without time, waiting would not exist - waiting would only be as mythical as men flying without wings. Perhaps night skies are too dark to see through and hazes to thick to see much further.

"Can you wait?"

"Only if you do."

Unidentifiable

I can't find very much - they are under stacks of paper, unseen, unidentifiable. I should be able to see it. I know I put them there but I think they're just buried under the mountain of work and words, passages of mispelled and unstructured essays. 

I won't see it - but when I do, it will probably be undecipherable and I probably won't even remember why I wrote it. I can't remember it now come to think of it. I just can't.

I hold it all really tightly together. The words, I mean - I hold them so tightly in my mind and squashed between the day's work that they can't breathe. They don't come out and when they do, they're just jumbled and unidentifiable scribbles on paper with black ink blotches on the side. I can't read them or see them properly. 

So I now need to find them, as they sit tucked away under some coffee-stained agreement (which I really need to find) and maybe reread it again and try to make sense of what it all means. But it might just be they are words lost and now I just need to build them up again.

It feels, however, that I've held them so tightly that they've been crushed, and completely unidentifiable.

Story

I thought I'd written the story perfectly.

It felt perfect when I had the pen on the paper and let the words just spill out - they were perfectly arranged and articulated in every sentence. But then I destroyed it by tipping black ink all over the table and by watching helplessly as the darkness seeped into the script and all over the words I'd so carefully woven together.

By the way, did I mention that this is a story of two and not just some stupid fairy tale about Little Red Riding Hood? This was meant to be kept carefully under lock and key but I made a mess of it. Trying to wipe away the ink with my hands only made the black smudge and dismember what little words were left.

I think I said sorry in my haste, and tried to recover everything I could but I now accept it is gone. I remember so little of that story now - all the perfect scenes I'd painted with words are now in the dark and I can't see them any more.

But give me a chance - I'll write some more and correct the mistakes and undo the missing words to create new ones. And I promise I can, and I promise I will compose something more special then the one that went before.

Time to Go

It's time to go, honey.
The night is growing dark,
the children are now in bed
tucked away under covers
protecting them
from imagined monsters and demons
that roam their minds
and maybe it's time we left them
to grow up and grow away.

It's time to go, honey.
There's a fire eating at the edges
devouring through the middle
and it's sadness honey - our sadness
telling us that we can make it;
it pulls a veil over our eyes
and disappears into the night
leaving us blind
and stumbling in the dark.

It's time to go, honey.
It isn't working any more
and it wouldn't matter no more
about the words we would say
or the gestures we could make,
everything is now hushed
broken beyond our grasp
and the sadness is only what
we share; and it can never be the same.

It's time to go, honey
It's time for me to go.

Vignette #8

Let's talk about how you're feeling today.

Um...okay. I guess that's why I'm here. I'm feeling okay.

Silence

What do you mean by 'okay'?

I'm fine. Just okay.

How would you like today to go?

I don't know. I'm not sure what to expect.

We're here today to help you. But in order to do that, you need to say a little more. How are you really feeling?

Silence

I feel everything. Everything from sadness to anger to loneliness. I feel everything. But happy.

Okay. Do you want to run me through these emotions?

I feel sad in the mornings and I then go for a run and the sadness becomes anger which I pound into the pavement. And when I get home, I feel lonely because I've just fought an emotional battle on my own and there's no one there to help me.

Do you know where these emotions come from?

They come from  inside me - the very core of me. It's turmoil all the time. I can't help it.

Silence

Would you like to talk me through the running?

Twiddling of thumbs

It's...it's how I punish myself but reward myself at the same time...a reward because it gives me a chance to battle the feelings and kill the anger. But it's a punishment at the same time because I know I'm hurting myself. I like the pain of running with my injured ankle and the pain of running on an empty stomach. It's an accomplishment. I really do...like it.

Do you think you could be relapsing?

Silence

I don't know.