On/off

On childhood and the imagination

Children should never be bored. Nothing ever bored me when I was a child. I played for hours with nothing but baby powder and a blue coloured pencil. I built kingdoms of bubbles, and went to infinity and beyond on my trusty, cracked, grey leather couch. I fought in the trenches with my rocking chair, and haggled with Arab merchants swathed in knitted blankets. I called upon pagan gods with burnt offerings of the finest bougainvillea petals, and dispensed potions for all occasions in minibar-sized bottles of intriguingly-coloured liqueurs. I waited on fairies while perched on an ottoman-shaped toadstool, and ruled the world with a paper crown and spaghetti scepter.

Now I am old, and all I can do is rack my brains for such fodder to write down and sigh at in the remembrance of how it used to be.

On reading/writing

Reading, especially blogs, where it is easier to believe that there is a real person behind the lines, is throwing me into despair.

Some days it seems that there is no point to my writing, as everything I want to say has already been written down, and in better words.

But I cannot live without reading or writing and so I suppose I must subject myself to an eternity of feeling mediocre and repetitious, or worse, unoriginal.

On language and thoughts

I want to be a baby again, so I can experience emotions without words cluttering up the way I feel.

On memory

Do you ever think of all the memories ever lost?

Like your very first word. (My parents forgot mine.)

Or the crushes you forgot you had.

Or the brilliant insights that didn’t last long enough to be imprisoned in ink.

Or the moments in your life when you thought everything was perfect. Because if you think of them now, chances are you’ll also think of all the reasons it really wasn’t that you just hadn’t realized at the time.

And do you ever think…if they’re really, truly lost…that it’s somehow like they never really were?

On the man who lives on the corner in the cold

He is old, or I think he is, because I cannot see his face. It is too covered by his beard, and I dare not look too closely for I hate being stared at, and I am sure, so does he.

I am not alone; the multitudes of passers-by seem not to sense his presence, though perhaps he is too familiar to be out of place. Did they notice him when he first sat down, I wonder, and how long did it take them to forget?

Bending (perhaps a little self-conscious) to drop more change than I can afford into the always-almost-empty, conspicuously (but somehow not incongruously) pink cup is the hardest thing to do.

Because it reminds me that he is human, and also someone’s son.

And that I don’t want to do this, to throw coins his way and hope it makes a difference, knowing that it doesn’t.

No, what I really want to do is bring him home. I want to let him take a shower, have a shave, sleep the night away on a bed and not the pavement, cook him dinner, then breakfast, then lunch, to chase away the cold from the inside of his heart.

What I really, really want to do is love him, because no one else will.

But no one else needs loving quite so much.

But I can’t. And it hurts.

Off

you go now. I feel like being alone.