The end
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Just to say, thanks for reading Letters to Ed.
It’s been a sort of home for me over the last five years but it’s time to pack up and move on now. So that’s what I’ve done, packed up my words and thrown away the key.
Hopefully I’ll carry on writing because a guilty conscience needs to confess and writing is my way. I’ll keep on watching myself, I’ll make things up, I’ll describe what I see and perhaps we’ll bump into each other again one day.
isabelle
now…..http://lettersconcerning.wordpress.com/
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Even though the trees are bare, it feels like spring is coming. Summer even. I walked to work today. The skies were blue, the sun was warm. I could have gone the road way round but I chose the long way round for two reasons. The first being it’s much quieter and more beautiful to walk through fields and woods than to walk on tarmac. The second, because of my own silly vanity.
I like to write as I walk. Of course not for real, but in my head. To make up sentences, to say things in a particular way. I’m not sure how productive it is because I never seem to remember accurately what I’ve ‘written’ as I’ve walked, but sometimes the ghost of it is there when I get back home and put pen to paper. In the past I’ve tried to voice my thoughts as I walked but the words sounded wrong out loud. I felt ridiculous. Today I walked up Stretch Gate and across the fields and up onto Managers Brow where I thought of my mum. Of her capriciousness….. When I die, I want my ashes scattered on Managers Brow she’ll often declare dramatically. I hope you have a lot of ashes I’ll laugh, because their destination is so wide and varied. Some days it’s under the lilac in her back garden, others it’s on top of Pikedaw Hill and on wanderlust days we’ve even been told to throw them to the wind in India and Machu Picchu. Perhaps she’ll reach all those places when the time comes. Over Managers Brow the bilberry bushes were bare but green and somehow beginning. I didn’t see a soul but I heard the song of birds I wish I recognised by sound alone and saw two pink and fattened wood pigeons side by side on a high branch. I was glad I didn’t meet anyone. That was the second reason I chose the long way round. Last night I dyed my hair. My hair has had an unruly life and I like it that way. Its want is to twist and knot and fuzz and mat. I’ve noticed over the last few years it has begun to dull, a few grey hairs have sneaked their way amongst the red and the blonde. Age is chasing it and suddenly I’ve been feeling old and tired too. I bought a permanent hair dye. Bright auburn and now I look dyed and different. Not as orange as Vivienne Westwood, not as plum as Sharon Osbourne, but not me and perversely I feel more self-conscious and unattractive; quite the opposite of what I was hoping for, what I had imagined. Like a teenager I googled ‘what to do when you dye your hair and HATE it ‘. I’m afraid the general consensus was that red is hard to remove ( no surprises there) and that it’s either grin and bear it or bleach it and re-dye.
Tonight I’m going to wash my hair six times in a row, try not to look in the mirror and tomorrow I’ll walk the short or long way into work depending on the weather rather than the ridiculous state of my hair.
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Sat 4th Feb:
Sometimes I wonder why I bother to write. I try not to think about it too much. It’s a way of transferring I think. If I don’t get the words out they clutter up my head and I feel suffocated. So writing is a bit like swimming, it helps me to breathe more freely. And afterwards I am recharged.
Sunday 5th Feb:
Today as I drove to work the sky was paint-water grey and the clouds looked quite swollen. The tops were already covered in snow. The light is an end-of-the-world-dark but threatening brightness. The streets are washed clean, the pavements would shine if the sun came out. The rain falling is trying so hard to be snow. Intermittently among the heavy rain drops, loose fat flakes fall and disappear as soon as they hit the ground. They never quite make it.
Monday 6th Feb:
The tops are well and truly covered now. In thick white snow and the sky is bouldering. There’s a definite line where the moors let into the fields. The air is cold. Vital. This small town is quiet, as if it is waiting for something. The traffic rumbles through. All those people have a destination I think. There is no other way. They are all going somewhere.
Wednesday 8th Feb:
I walked for miles today. Alongside walls which in my youth I imagined to be made from the marbles of giants. I remembered times long gone when my mother could walk for miles before she became trapped and crippled. I took pictures to remind her of the big skies and clean air. But mainly I just walked. I guess it’s like writing, just quieter.
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akrasia
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I need to say goodbye. Let’s go on a walk. I want to describe rather than explain. Introspection would break me right now.
Around here the places have names to send you somewhere. Crimea Lane clings to the moor side and on a day of sun the view is verdant. On Jerusalem Road the trees grow gnarled and lopsided, wind stunted and blackened. There’s Austonly and Paris. We don’t say it like the city; here it’s pronounced ‘Pearis’. This whole landscape is diagonal and patchwork. Perpendicular to the sky. There’s Slant Gate and Stretch Gate; one almost plumb, the other tree-lined and guarded by a rookery.
Hidden, in spite of rather than because of the moors, there is a scrapyard. It is a place of great beauty. The men who work here are used to the cold and the bleak seeping off the moors. They have ruddy cheeks which are livid against the fluorescence of their coats. Their hands have grown big and rough through handling cold hard metal. They laugh to keep warm and throughout the day they ignore their bodies. They pay no attention to the dampness creeping into bone and flesh. And when they arrive home their hard outside bodies are almost revolted by the clean warm fug of indoors. Without even thinking about it they are used to the air in their lungs and the vast empty expanse of sky.
Today I weighed in copper pipes, a rusty old engine and a bag of wires. I laughed with the men. I was in awe of their elemental life. My hair was damp, my face was cold, I was happy.
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Bed was the place they talked the most. Not with the hushed filth of lovers. She pressed her lips into the musk of his chest. In that place not one soul in the world could see her face. As she spoke her mouth twisted.
I am struggling, she said. Everything feels hard. A trial . I’m finding it difficult to see the lightness in things. He stroked her hair.
I’m not stupid, she whispered. I know that ultimately life is meaningless -that we have to give it meaning. But I am tired of the looking for meaning being so hard.
When she was younger it had been different. Then all it took was a switch in her head, a change of perspective. Pressed and hidden against skin and hair she suddenly had in mind her own story of the night butterfly.
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I have an untidy mind. It’s probably woolly too. Felted, curled at the edges, distracted; it’s probably more than a little grubby. Some might call it dirty. Particular moments stick like glue whilst others gallop away before I’ve even finished having them. I wouldn’t have trouble with describing myself as capricious. I want to laugh in your face and say kuh-pree-chee-oh-soh.
I have been rummaging around in what I call my drawers. They’re files really. Little electronic compartments of words. But I like to see them as big wooden oak smelling heavy drawers. To pull open and leaf through; pencil behind my ear, spectacles tipping my nose muttering, hmm, let me see……..and well, I find the strangest of things. Words written that I have no memory of ever writing. Take this as an example…….
“I mustn’t read anything else until I have read this, until I have finished it, until I have devoured it, because I sense it was written to be devoured. But, before I begin I must write some more of my own words. First I must give these ideas form, swell their skin, make their eyes sparkle and their lips as full as they should be. I must give this longing a voice – throaty and delicious. Put into words the battle of stealing and strengthening. Attempt to capture the particular essence of two particular bodies, fucking, joining , in effect losing themselves. It feels like an impossible feat. To find the words. Because sex is enigmatic, it is both self-centered and dependant. It changes like the weather.”
I can’t for the life in me remember what it was I was reading which sparked such words. I’m half wondering that it could be Little Birds. By writing this, I’m saying it was Little Birds. I want it to be so. And then I follow with…..
“I want stories which will grip me by the heart, written with words to make me sigh, to make me ache, to make me smile. Words to make me think.”
If only I could take my snippets and meanderings and fashion them into something worth reading. Make each word count like a stitch. In the necessary sense, not as embroidery or adornment, but to pull the story together. Stitches thick enough to hold a canvas bag full of letters or strong enough to secure the luff edge of a sail. Good enough to stand the test of time and the elements of fashion and criticism. But too often I am haunted by a line from a poem or novel which in its simplicity manages to convey the whole of what I was trying to write. Sparse, careful words which seem to throw scorn on my own efforts. The placing of a single word can send me into pleasures I find hard to hold in my own writing. The plumpness of ‘astonishment’ amongst a line of verse can set my heart racing. The cool placing of a metallic word, shiny-hard, laid flat like a knife at the table can catch my breath. Edges.
“Oh, it is so close; a whole world beyond the reach of my own words.”
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opopanax
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The scent of her sex mingled with the smell of her scent - sweet myrrh like Molly before her. Oh she was full alright, fit to burst . It was an inside ache – quite the opposite to the shriek of his cock – it was secret, hidden like a lie. She didn’t care what he thought but she was glad he watched her. Across the street she saw the ripple of his blind, lazy winking half-open and she felt the sudden warm wet rush as she positioned herself on a wooden school chair. Her fingers were stand-ins for a plethora of phallus and in the grainy light one foot toe-tipped whilst the other flattened against bare floorboards. She would show him.
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She told him, “I will write our story. I will give us a history. A past, a present and a future. Our lives will not be one of letters exchanged or a build up of words back and forth, of paragraphs and sentences. It will be one of flesh and bone, of blood and laughter and hair and eyes and sunlight and vast panoramas. We will touch and love, skin on skin, tongue to tongue . We will live out loud.”
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I knew a man who hanged himself. It seems wrong to introduce him that way because obviously he was so much more than a man who hanged himself. But that is often the way. Suicide is the final ace. The hideous trump card.
Remember Joe?
Joe?
Yeah, the guy who hanged himself.
Oh yeah, I remember Joe.
I was never intimate with him. I never slept with him. I never even kissed him. I hadn’t known him for half my life or even a quarter of his. He was tall and striking with blue eyes. He rode a Velocette and was always dirty. I never once saw him with clean hands. He was beautiful in the way children are beautiful. Guileless. It was the summer of 1994, my youngest daughter was a baby. He lived in a small flat two doors down from the tiny shop I rented.
The first conversation we had was about childbirth. I was sitting outside the shop in the sunshine with my baby in my arms. He was outside in the small yard in front of his flat doing things to his bike. He was always doing things to bikes. Sometimes it was hard to see where the bike ended and he began. I knew that feeling. It was a good feeling. The way edges would blur. Perhaps it wasn’t like this but I remember it so- that his first words to me were “does it hurt very much to give birth?” He was in earnest. Each word mattered and I knew each one I gave him back in reply he would remember. “Yes. Yes it does, it hurts a lot”. He looked right into my eyes, concerned. “But, well, it’s the kind of pain that’s easy to mythologise. It can be turned into a story, that helps somehow”. He nodded. I think he understood.
Over that summer he told me how he slept very little. He drank coffee to keep awake because he was so tired because he couldn’t sleep. I’ve never seen someone smoke so much. His bike growled over the cobbles each evening he came home. He wore an old-fashioned helmet and he rode quickly for the feeling. I think I understood why. He liked to recall his childhood. The thrill of first times. He said with resignation that being an adult was disappointing, monotonous even. He told me about the christmas when he was eight and had stayed awake all night. He was waiting for a train. A train to take apart and put back together. I have always been in awe of people who can take things apart and put them back together again. It’s as if they are playing God.
“Waiting for and getting the train was one of the best days of my whole life”. I could see he meant it.
I wish I had something profound to say about his death. I don’t. His friend found him hanging from a hook in the cellar. The hook he hung bike frames from to spray. At his funeral his sister read a poem. The Train. All of a sudden I was six again with my eyes closed and my dad’s voice in my head. I wished with all my heart I could have said something to have made a difference. I wished I could have rearranged things. But I cannot take things apart and put them back together so they work.
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He sat on top of the gate and waited for her. The fields stretched green until they met the moors and he squinted into the distance hoping to catch her as a speck before she caught him and waved and smiled and began to walk faster. He closed his eyes in anticipation. She was heat and weight and a soft liquidity which made his cock ache. Already he knew her smell. Warm-ripe from the sun and a damp earth scent at the nape of her neck. Her tongue was apple sweet and greedy. Her hips seemed to sway towards his words and she draped her arms over each of his thighs and met his smile with her usual greeting, ” so, what do you know ? “
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