Take it back, Charlotte’s ramblings
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“I remember the first time I heard the word voyeur. It felt like butter in my mouth. Velvet-golden and moment-capturing. Of course when I look at him awake or sleeping – at the times when he is unaware of the trail of my eyes, the knife of my scrutiny, the melt of my heart – I am watching what we have become and underneath it all I am wishing I could take us back to way back when.When we first met there were no imaginings of what it would be like if we lived together, if we had children together. We did not make life plans. We were in the moment, blind to the future, intoxicated by the present. That a home was made along with babies was the consequence of living. There were reflective moments, times when we stepped back to survey the scene, adjust the lighting, fiddle with the volume; but in the main we lived our lives in the here and now. I’m not sure when that changed. The shift was imperceptible, perhaps it was even necessary. At some point maybe the fear of death crept into life.
When I was young I hung about what seemed to be the highest cricket ground in the world. A clipped green square held tight by high stone walls separated only from the rough of the moors by the sweated graft of times before. The men in white were fluid exclamations in an otherwise coarse and raw landscape. I made no conscious distinction between such formality and the natural chaos of the moors beyond, but the rush was palpable as I slid away behind the sheds where grubby boys pissed into nettles and rose-bay-willow herb and girls on the cusp of adolescence parleyed games of sex. On the other side of the wall I could press my back against the cold stone, feel it riddle my shoulder blades and breath in massive lungfuls of distance. And now at night when we lie in bed in darkness the wall comes back to me in gritty clarity and I see my fingernails picking islands of yellow-green lichen, I smell the damp rough grass and I am transported back to lugubrious skies at the top of the world.”
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“To parl” isn’t in my Shorter OED nor the online version. I assume it’s to speak, parler – or does it have a more specialised sense?
hello looby, hmm, well, I was thinking of parle too, I wondered if I’d made it up… and I was going to right ‘parried games of sex’….. perhaps that sounds better ? Sometimes I just write things and read them back and if they sound ok in my headvoice I use them.
I found this just now……http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/parled
hello again looby, now this is what I actually meant……
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/parleyed
this is the word I was hearing in my head. It was more than just talking, I meant a sort of one-man-up-man-ship between the girls. …….
Thank you for the reference. Yes, to parley – the overtone of a contest, or of discussing treaty arrangements gives it a lot more colour. “Parried” would be more physical than the speech act of parley.