…resemble an airport bar…
Has it really been a year? The days slipped away like cascading sand but my chest carried the weight of decades gone by. If I recount the last 365 days I can only muster a few dream like images: the smell of the canal in summer, a hot breeze rustling through dry leaves. The perpetual feeling of longing, trying to hold on to something real. Everyone will have their own version, stories of private epiphanies that changed them forever. The sense of waiting stalks me like a shadow. I’m hurtling on a bus that I cannot jump from. Perhaps that is not the right analogy. I’m standing on a platform at a station that only has a few trains but I refuse to buy a ticket.
I stood outside golden houses watching, pleading for my senses to be dulled so I could block out the colourful sounds and smiling faces. I had been locked out of the palace, left outside and forgotten. The ivy had started to cover me as it took root and slowly pulled me down. There was no forward, neither could I go back – the only way was down, or up. The ground invited me with it’s warm and safe surroundings. I was promised my own hiding place, a way to escape. I would dig deep, they could never hope to find me… But I could feel the sun, her rays stroking my skin. She quenched my thirst with rain, she sent birds to sing me to sleep. The ground pulled and pulled, but I stretched up and up, higher and higher until I could no longer see the ground. I can still feel it, I know it is there. Sometimes I wish to go back, but it is too late now. Occasionally the heavy rains will fall and I feel them drowning my foundations. That is when the ground pulls once more, and buries my roots all the deeper.
When did my life start to resemble an airport bar? A revolving door that I cannot exit, no matter how many times I go round. Do you ever have those dreams, the ones when you are desperately searching but you can never find your way back to where you started? You cannot help but keep trying, even though you know that whatever magic is holding you in place is completely beyond your own power.
C O R A V I O L E T 