An open letter to no one.

Because this prose is for no one and I don't know you, I'll turn it into an advert: a letter of recommendation from the stars. I'm glowing. I have hands and feet that I mistrust and a heart that could even make the doctor's blush. I'll write my promises onto the sun and even after they've been burnt away, I'll keep them. I want to know you. I've jumped to the front of the queue and I will do anything to keep your eyes fixed on mine. I work with impossibility. I will take you to the top of the Ferris wheel to serenade you with poor attempts at concealing fear, I'll tell you horror stories of people stubbing their toes on low-lying objects. I'll teach bruises what colour means. Your irises are stunning. You could teach the sky what passion feels like and it would still take it a million years to reach that shade. I will grind my bones as I pause the planets in line: gather 'round, this is how it feels when time stands still. I broke my watch in the harbour the night I first dreamt of you, swimming through the sea on a half-eaten body board. You made even the sharks blush.

I'm sure I've met you before. You were the boy reading my favourite book at the back of the bus that I wanted to sit next to. The conversation I never started. The missed connection, standing atop the harbour bridge with the birds soaring around you. You are the blue mosquito lights, buzzing each time I reach out to you. Yours were the first footsteps, walking through a sea of glass bottles, each surface reflecting the sun. I fell in love with your hands.

I am the woman on the moon. You are the letter I sent to myself and put extra stamps on it so I knew it would find me wherever I was. You are the notes I leave myself next to the best passages, the crack in my tardis mug, the second just before I stepped on the picture hook, burying it in my heel. You were the exit sign that fell on my head in 2006. The stranger that caught me looking too long at you. Your ankles are splendid.

If by chance you read this, meet me underneath the sprawling tree. I'll bring fireworks. You bring the music. I'll pick your name from a hat and call it magic. I am the master magician and I'd cut me in half to stand before you again. You're what summer feels like. At forty one degrees, my mouth stayed shut, and you- still a stranger, taught me what it's like to regret.

I'll fold time in half, back to that afternoon and I'll steal those tomatoes. You bit into one and the seeds came spilling out. I've never met such beautiful teeth before. I’ll eat the whole of Italy to meet them again.

In order to win you over, I'll break the seasons apart and pull out only the perfect days for you: the thunderstorms; the ones where every possible thing goes so wrong that it becomes funny; the late nights in funny costumes and back alleys; the days that fall in by chance. The sort of chance that feels lucky for every single second and makes you wonder if it's really real. You're not real. I'll bet your bones are stunning.

If you read this, I will have not existed. I am a madwoman with grand ideas and I would teach you how to fly if you didn't already seem like the sort of person that knows how. The birds got their lessons from you, and I put them to flight. I am terrible at self-promotion. Come meet me by the unplanned location. I'll be sure not to forget you.

The moon is waxing gibbous

You’ll be brave this time. Your name will seep through your skin and you’ll feel it. Poaching eggs with faces like the moon. Running through the city like there’s two minutes until the end of the world and the lights are down. Riding your bike and pretending like it’s the largest place on earth, and you can carry everyone. Get in. You have dirty hands. Keep them. These words run off everything you touch and you’re no longer a one-liner, you’re Moby Dick in a kingdom by the sea, where the angels come to steal lessons. Your skin burns. You are the bold seagull, hopping on one leg to get my attention. You have learned what it is like to fly and you’re begging me to be Fenchurch: lose your socks over London. This time you’ll be the one to steal the tomatoes. You are the mirrored hall in Versailles. You are the glass lake before the Doctor gets shot and all time folds back on itself. You are time. Feel it. Remember what it was like, back when you and everything else was still nothing. Remember that burst of joy, when you finally became something. You’ll be the Mediterranean, burning white with the sun, eight minutes late and five billion years early. You’ll be the phone number written on the palm, the sweat that rises to meet it, the eyes like Ferris wheels in front of a 1920’s sunset. You’ll be the colour green. You’ll be bold this time, to take my hand and pull me along in the rain like nothing else matters, nothing but that the lights are out and you are turning into the moon.

The silences

What if the commandment “do not take the lord’s name in vain” is not about the crying out of a name, the swearing and the pain that comes with it? What if the blasphemy comes not from crying “Jesus!” when one stubs a toe, but from the ignoring of the silences?

“Yahweh”, the Hebrew name for the god of the Christians and the Jews, is an unpronounceable phrase, a word for one who will take claim to none. Yahweh. The word meant not to be spoken, but to be felt and to be known. Felt, as one feels the closeness of a lover.

What then, is god’s name but a breath on the neck of the person you love; the silences that conversation need not fill; the spaces between fingers? What if, all this time, this god of the jews was just warning us not to forget the little things, to not blaspheme the silences? To remind us broken, brittle beings of the lives that surround us, and the silences that go with them.

Auto

I thought about it today, when the last time was that I wrote about my life. Maybe that’s it, that’s what’s keeping me away: that I’ve gotten too far away from me. I don’t know this land anymore, I don’t know what it is to be autobiographical.

I have stopped knowing, and now every breath is a question. I have looked around and I’m not entirely sure where I am, but it isn’t earth and it sure as hell isn’t home. I’ve wrapped myself up in worlds of fantasy, not entirely content with reality. That’s a lie. There isn’t a part of me that prefers real life these days. All I know is that I’m waiting, waiting for the sort of adventure that will fall out of the sky and crash through my life. I read and listen and watch all these ordinary people, whose lives were made extraordinary, and I wonder if it will ever happen to me. It’s a hope, bordering on insanity; a desperation that this isn’t all there is. It’s enough to turn a normal person mad. But maybe I was never normal. Maybe I was always mad. I think about all the things I could be doing, the power that I can make with paper and ink, I wish I was Van Gogh. I wonder if I will ever write properly. I want to write a book, but I cut my words short: I haven’t yet learned how to fill a book with silence, and I wonder if I should take up acting. I’m too shy. I want to be some part of something and I want to feel extraordinary. I find it too easy to be alone and sometimes this scares me. I want to chase the life I know I can have, but I’m scared of leaving my cat behind. I don’t want to acknowledge how ridiculous that sounds. I feel the earth dragging me closer to the ground and pulling my eyes shut. Dream, it says to me, fill your life with the impossibilities, when all my feet want to do is run. Maybe my mind isn’t big enough, maybe there are a billion other people smarter and more talented than I but maybe I can still be something. I suppose in order to create what I need to I need to go home, to the ocean where everything I’ve lost in this world finally washes up, if I wait long enough. Maybe there I will find my extraordinary.

All this loss

The morning I read that the Japanese Otter had been declared extinct, I thought to myself, “Fuck humanity”, and felt the overwhelming hopelessness of a species that did nothing but live, and for that was punished alongside the greatest criminals by being wiped from this life.

How do you turn these things into beauty when even the words we write are being destroyed by the trees we cut down for the paper ink needs. How do you feel the loss of things when loss to most is the moments before finding your phone and finding that there’s no more milk in the fridge. Still, that sort of loss is tainted with “found” and when do we really know what “extinction” means?

Between the politics of religion and science, between the left and the right, the lambs are still the ones being slaughtered as we celebrate the coming of spring. And what is spring but the dance between life and death?

What justifies a war where the innocents are the only ones who lose? Who will we have left to mourn our loss when all that’s left of this green world is the enterprise of death, and the gods: oh those poor sodden gods are drowning their sorrows for creating such a species as humanity. I don’t really give a shit about being poetic about this because when responsibility is left to the few that don’t care, extinction is something that we caused, and something we’ll forget until the next time someone checks the fridge and finds there’s no more milk.

Today is an orange

Today is an orange

Sweet and tasting of the sun

I rub it between my hands and it’s skin stains mine

The citrus sprays onto my face

I’m tired.

Who else loves the birds like you?

I thought it was because they fly

But you said it was because of when they fall

When they’re young

And jumping out of the nest is only natural

I pull apart today

And place the segments side by side

The skin in the top left corner

Of my wooden palm

I was always a table

Drawing graphs and measuring

Glass beakers still sit over my skin

Leaving marks from condensation

All the parts of us that you separated

Now the moon is full

Like the eggs you cared for so carefully

When their mother flew into the underside of a truck

One day it will break open

But I don’t want to think that far ahead

Because if I do, I’ll fall out of this nest that we built

Breaking apart into segments

Of all the places I’ve been without you

And the only thing I’ll have left is skin

Orange and wooden