Never let go

She was the girl who never learned to let go.

At nine months, her peers were learning to drop things, letting their toys go falling to the floor over and over, shrieking with joy at their new game. But she continued to clutch her toys to her, fearful of losing them. When her parents unclasped her sticky, chubby fingers from her lifelines of stuffed bears and building blocks, she would cry inconsolably.

Later, she failed to learn how to let go of a swing rope; refused to let go at the top of a slide; clutched ice-cream cones in her fist until they melted and dissolved into a pulpy mess. She wouldn’t let her teachers take her homework from her to correct, wouldn’t let anyone near her hair with a scissors.

Throughout her life, she braved ridicule and irritation in the face of spent friendships, failed at school and work assignments to avoid graduation or promotion, and into drawer upon drawer poured a sea of receipts and cinema tickets. She avoided funerals and flea markets. And one by one, every man she ever loved walked out on her.

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Creative deficit

I haven’t been posting here so much simply because I haven’t been doing anything creative recently. I feel like I’m on the cusp of it again, but I’ve been so busy with working on my research project and socialising in every spare minute that it just hasn’t been happening.

Even more old ghosts have come out of the woodwork in the past week; it’s turning into a very strange summer. But maybe this means I can put them all to rest, finally. A summer of relationship closure.

Anyway, I keep going onto Amazon and looking at the Canon EOS 1100d, then checking my bank balance, then looking at Amazon again… It looks like I won’t have time to go on any holidays this summer, and I’m starting to use that as an excuse to just fork out and buy myself a camera. My dad’s camera is living in his study again – he just doesn’t seem to like me using it, and won’t let me take it anywhere, despite him only taking about 5 pictures on it a year. So time to buy my own, methinks.

Hopefully being able to lug a camera around with me more will mean I’ll get back into it a bit. And I feel a story gathering in the wings, too. If it wasn’t for this stupid thesis I would probably be doing lots of stuff at the moment, but duty calls…

(Edit: just realised I managed to originally spell ‘deficit’ with an extra ‘e’. What. Or should I say whate.)

Fleeting summer

Our wonderful weather came and went, as it tends to do in this country. We’ve had nearly two weeks of dull, rainy weather now, and although I was unhappy about it at first, today I’m relishing it. The last two days, the rain has been coming down properly, rather than depressing us all with a constant, pathetic drizzle, and today a gale has struck up, buffeting the attic in my parents’ house where I’ve come to visit. I went out for a walk earlier, when the rain had died down, and fell in love with the wind all over again.

It’s a happy kind of time for me now, though I am occasionally paralysed by moments of doubt and despair. I am the kind of person who fears, most of all maybe, repeating my own mistakes. If I cannot learn from past unhappiness, it is rendered pointless. And as a person who feels emotions very keenly, I sometimes feel I do not have the strength to face some of what I have in the past.

But these dark patches are few, and even the dullness and boredom of this mandatory research project I don’t care about cannot bring me down. Maybe I will finally learn to stop over-analysing, and to simply step into and live in the moment. I am full of hope.

Still, some nicer weather would be good, if only to encourage me to take photographs again!

Footprints

Take your shoes off at the door,
I don’t want your footprints on my heart.
Leave your shirt, all your encasings on the floor,
I want no secrets, no.

But I close the curtains over,
they don’t need to know.
And I throw my heartache out tonight.