Dreaming

         There I am living in a beautiful old windmill, creamy white textured walls. I don't remember any other colour, furnishing. Everything seems certain and solid. But then cracks start to show and one warm summer day blisters appear on the inside walls, like when damp escapes through the ceiling of an upstairs room, only it's on the walls. The windmill , I realise, is made of cheese, and the upper chambers are splitting like mozzarella, cracking like feta, blistering like a grilled goats cheese. I try to rescue something from the damaged upper rooms, desperate to hold on, but to what I'm not sure: mementos of a past that give me definition, photos, keepsakes, something that proves who I am, who I have been, but the stairs slew sideways and the expedition becomes as much about clawing the walls as it is about climbing the stairs. It is difficult to find anything in the crumbling rubble. I give up and resign my past to the rennet damp and stay down below. It is time to let go, time to move on. But I don't seem to be able to let go on my own.
         Some inexorable force  pulls me backwards through the walls as I claw at the insubstantial structure of my past, trying to hold on but I get nothing but crumbling  feta beneath my nails to show for my efforts. And then it is gone, a windmill life wiped from existence, like a theatre scene-change, the whole reality shifts into something that only existed in my mind. I am left standing in an alpine meadow bereft, waiting for Julie Andrews to sing the glory of creation into my soul.
         Here she comes. There is hope for a new beginning then: a rainbows  end beyond what I had believed were the confines of stability, reality. I march and run with her and twirl my Austrian skirts, climbing onto  puffs of marshmallow pink and white cloud which merge into spiral stairs, corkscrewing up though blue sky to a rose dripping gothic archway and  a Sissinghurst in the sky.  This seems more real than the windmill ever was,  now it is in front of me, and yet I know it to be impossible.
        Light flickers and the reality changes, images clicking out of time like an old fashioned film reel, home movies projected onto wood chip walls.  I find myself in tight stays and a stiff gown, sitting at a long polished refectory table, surrounded by people in Georgian wigs, a promenade of carnival masks,powdered faces and painted lips. Everyone is turning this way and that, noticing no one but waiting to be noticed; looking around the room to see who is looking back at them, where to curry favour. The air is laced with tension, expectation and rivalry. Servants bustle about puffed up with their own importance. Being busy and achieving nothing . There is no conversation and yet there is noise, a clash of unspoken slights and jealousies and judgements.
          A bugle sounds and one of the servants in a livery of green needlepoint waistcoat with gold buttons and matching trews, claps his hands. A stone wall is drawn apart like curtains the stones falling into folds revealing a grand terrace surrounded by roman balustrading. We gather at the opening, an eye onto another kingdom, and watch as great ostrich plumes in cream,red and gold explode in the sky like fireworks then fly away to the horizon. I hear a lone piper and realise there is a little girl tugging at my stiff skirts, my hand, wide eyed raggle-taggle haired, muddy faced. She is the image of myself as a mud pie making Tom-girl about two years old. She is unconcerned with etiquette and social proprieties. I watch her free spirited dance  and try to breath only feeling  the constraint of my stays, the stiff formality of fabric  supported by the disapproving glances from the gathered crowd, the tuts, the whispers as the child laughed and twirled and shone. The distaste emanating from the crowd spreads like an ink stain, like mustard gas, threatening to occlude my view of her  happiness and choke her freedom and yet she dances still.
      She dances to the piper, skipping and twirling, closer, closer to the edge of danger or safety, closer to the broken edges of polite order. The notes the piper plays are released as soap bubbles floating into the air, rising a note at a time, calling to my heart, hypnotic, like the pied pipers song. I call her too me, my younger self and she tugs at my hand, wanting to share her wonder.  I am holding the little girl's hand in mine protectively, not wanting her to be hurt, not wanting her to fall. I am torn between wanting to keep her safe and wanting to relish her spirit, her joy. The kernel of an idea cracks open in my heart and takes root, sending out shoots and leaves, it flourishes . I  don't want to let her go. I want to go with her, be her.
     I tear my cloth prison in two, stepping out of its stiff form. It remains standing like a discarded bean pod. I have been contained but now I am free. I swing the child high, celebrating our oneness then watch the soap bubble notes of the piper come within touching distance. We step inside a bubble and sheathed in its gossamer film, float from solid ground, from imposed constraints, to freedom, an uncertainty laced with joy and  happiness.

The Wisdom of Fish

 A pair of fools we were, I a fish in a pond, you a bird in the reeds.

The things in between whispered of love and treachery , desire and indifference.  Love. It was never going to work, me sleeping with the fish and you sleeping with your head under your own wing. 

      Your eye was warped in to kindliness by the surface tension of the pond and beyond your speckled breast I now see evil intention sleeping in your heart. After all that careful attention; a life time of longing. I had spent my time as fry craving your love, wishing to swim in the currents of air between us, but now, finally I have learned to swim away.

      I see the shadow of a skeletal fish in your eye so I swim where it is safer, here among the dense reed stalks, hidden in a weave of shadow. The things in between still whisper, but they whisper harmless gossip, not death and destruction.

      I will wait for a sustainable love, I have a will: lets call it patience. And you have it in spades also. But I will not be the victim of your crime; I am wise to your attention now. 

      But do not fret, there are plenty more fish in the sea.

Little Mouse (pt 2)

       She had closed her eyes only for a moment it seemed, watching the swirls of colour dance under her eyelids.  She had not meant to give in to the weight of sleep. A banging at her door had startled her from mellow honeyed dreams filled with saffron sights and the darkened room seemed particularly dreary after it. Her tea stood cold at the side of the bed, a tannin patchwork suspended on the surface. The banging came again and she carefully lowered her legs to the floor, shuffling her feet into sheepskin mules. Again, the urgent wrapping.

       “I’m coming, I’m coming” Some people were always in such a hurry. There was no time to be old.  

        It was unusual for her to get a caller after dark but she guessed it could be Martha wanting to ask her to babysit at the drop of a hat.  If she shook a leg she could be over there in what, ten minutes, fifteen maybe? She could do with the extra cash towards a new boiler. She peeped through the spy hole at the centre of the door, a useless precaution these days without her glasses. The lamp opposite shot out distress flares arcing across the street, orange across her retina, and she blinked them away trying hard to focus. Looking for Martha’s face. Where were her glasses?

       She was dreaming still. It must be a dream. She had imagined him coming to her so many times over the years. They had been getting stronger of late, she had feared she was loosing her marbles. Sometimes his appearance in her dreams seemed more real than the people on the street, memories of youth, authorities they were purely fantastical; dancing monkey gods carrying him to her on a litter through the sky; her prince, blue skinned riding a stately elephant hung about with golden marigold garlands. Always he was coming, but never arriving. It was a cruel trick. 

      ‘Get a grip old girl’ she would tell herself sternly, “now is not the time for girlish fantasies.” 

       And yet, there he was, her husband. This distorted, convex big-headed image could not be a fantasy. She clawed at the door, the yale, desperate to fling wide the truth of this dream. She could barely remove the safety chain for the tremors in her hand. And then there they were, face to face at last, nothing between them. There was a shadow of doubt, a shadow of lost years written in the lines of his face but as their eyes met it was puffed out, extinguished.

      She did not battle against the encroaching sea of emotion but let the tears of joy roll down her creased cheeks as they fell into each others embrace. The ache of doubt and years apart melting away like writing in the sand.  She buried her head in the crook of his neck imprinting her body to his, inhaling his scent, the same rose and patchouli, the forbidden fruits of eden she had longed for all these years and never been able to forget. His voice cracked as he spoke to her and the hopes he’d held fast all these years burst their defences.

     “I have found you at last Little Mouse.” She raised her head and they kissed just as they had as young lovers, consumed by each other, oblivious of anything beyond the confines of their own embrace.

    “We started a symphony between us once but it has followed a tortured path my Little Mouse.  How about we write a simple ballad together?” She laughed through her joy and looked on him with love, taking his hand and drawing him into her world.