The Chaise Longue

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The golden chaise longue wouldn’t fit through my door. It didn’t matter how often I uncoiled my tape measure or how many fags Hev smoked on the front step, it was too big - or my doorway was too small. I was stuck with an already paid for sofa in the hallway of my block of flats. Fellow tenants circled the chaise longue,  prodding it with fingers, offering up solutions, but we all knew the real answer: I had to get rid of it. 

     
Hev and I had driven it over that morning; it stuck out like a giant banana from the back of Jo’s Grandma’s Estate car. This was meant to be my new start, the opening credits to my freshly arranged life. If I am not to move from my flat in the near future, I'd vowed, I shall beautify, brighten and spruce up what I already have – a tiny attic flat, and rudimentary, with blue office carpets and a kitchen the size of a shower cubicle. But my tiny flat has an extra-special bonus – it’s thirty seconds from the sea, from swimming that sends me shivering back through my flat’s doorway. And that’s enough to keep me here.      
     
But the chaise longue wouldn’t fit. We propped it up in the hallway, and pushed the old one back up the three flights to my flat. It was like some poor old grandmother who refused to go back into the nursing home. Back inside my flat resembled a crime scene - furniture, cushions and rugs roughly thrown into various corners of my living room, my bedroom entrance blocked by an empty bookcase. Days earlier, I'd carefully arranged my books into sub-genres - now they trailed, sad, across the bathroom carpet. I sank down onto my living room floor with a cup of black tea (no milk; my fridge broke yesterday). Rain battered my windows. The chaise longue felt like a symbol for my life: a beautiful bright idea, but frankly, impossible.      
     
A friend dragged me out for chocolate cake. When I returned, rain lashing at my legs, hands and face, the chaise longue was still standing in the hallway, gorgeous and golden and looking bigger than ever. I squelched past it up the stairs (Converse trainers soak up puddles like Kleenex) and upon entering my flat, saw I’d left my bedroom window open. Rain had gushed in all over my laptop and the precious items of Mum’s that I’d gathered in Wales and placed by my shrine. Notebooks, a lacquered box, her hand support brace, trinkets, letters, all sodden.     
     
I'd like to think joy's around the corner. And that when it comes I will capture it in my palms and, after a while, set it free above the waves and pebbles. But the rains keep coming and little feels sacred anymore.     
    
I have this memory. I’m on a hillside smothered in buttercups; the sky is cloudless and blue. Buttercups stretch as far as I can see. They merge with the sunlight that’s half-blinding me, that drops golden over distant treetops. I am dancing down this hillside. With each step I take I shed a year of my life. With each thrust of my hand I shed another. Years drop from me like dead skin. Under soft sunlight and between two fences and the horizon, all pain disappears. There’s no cancer. No lupus. No epilepsy. No Alzheimer’s. No stroke, coma, pneumonia. No death. No struggle. No loss. Only golden light and a sheep staring at me from over a wooden fence. Only me, dancing, momentarily a girl again, sweet, silly, captivated by a perfect moment.    
     
There’s no way back to that hillside. So I move forward. Push chaise longues up steep flights of stairs. I work; write. I make absurd birthday presents out of ping pong balls for my friends. I put my flat back together again. I chase waves when they are big. I watch the clouds moving above my house. Wait for something golden to enter my life once again.   

Occidental Park

I'm sitting in Occidental Park eating a grilled tuna and provolone sandwich. Most people here, except for a few tourists like me, appear homeless, mentally ill, or both. Two police officers slowly cycle the perimeter. This small square in Seattle's Downtown looks pretty with its Native American sculptures, its seagulls flying overhead.
    
To my left, a black teenager with crinkled hair drags her anorak collar across her mouth as she stares into space. Next to her sits a man in a t-shirt with multi-coloured circles on it and, beside him, an old guy in a battered straw hat who is smoking a roll-up.
  
As I look over at these three people, a woman comes over. She's dressed in a long black plastic coat and a black baseball cap turned backwards. She's walking onto the square from between a tall carved monkey and some other Totem animal that I don’t recognise. She is barefoot and has a large toilet roll under one arm. In the other, she holds a branch. She stabs at the pavement with it as she walks.

On top of her baseball cap, a black pigeon cleans its feathers. The woman's face is dark as peat. She yells out to the man in the t-shirt with the circles on.
  
He hollers back, his gold-rimmed specs glinting in the mid-afternoon sun. "I got something for ya!"
  
A Chinese lady next to me on the bench looks disturbed by this sight and stares, mute, at the pigeon that is still preening itself. She is well dressed - expensive shoes, neat hair. I want to share a conspiratorial smile with her, but she won't look at me. A few other tourists dot the benches. The pigeon woman sits down beside the man.
  
That pigeon looks as though it's always lived on her baseball cap. She stares at me with her black crack eyes. I look down at my notebook.
  
The Chinese lady lets out a crazy high-pitched squeal. I notice that the other tourists have left.

A cop approaches our bench. "JinSu?" he says to the Chinese lady.

She nods.

"Is anyone bothering or hurting you?" He adjusts his sunglasses. "Come see me if..."
  
He cycles off. A seagull flaps its wings. Fairy lights sparkle above an ivy-covered hotel doorway opposite. It looks out of place here, with its pastel umbrellas out front, its matching cloth napkins.
  
Everyone else is dozing. I should leave.

A man approaches the Chinese lady. "I've seen you before!" he says with a sneaky cat smile, "Did you get a shelter?"

She giggles.
  
I should go. I should leave.
  
 "I t-aught I taw a puddy cat!" shouts gold-rimed specs man. "I'm having flashbacks!"
  
Everyone else is silent, except for pigeon woman, who eagerly munches her sandwich. Three policemen now circle on push-bikes.
  
I get up and say goodbye to the Chinese lady. She looks at me for a second, and then smiles.

I want to be looking up at cranes, staring out at departing ferries. I start walking down towards the waterfront. I glance back and see the Chinese lady now leaning forward, her long black hair hung in strips, her anorexic hands clutching the air.

Hello

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Today in my bathroom, after I'd arranged shampoos and beauty products according to their  exact colour shade, after I'd scoured and sluiced my bathtub, sink, and toilet, after I'd painted the walls in Morning Mist and ummed and ahhed about what pictures to  hang, after I'd scrubbed the grouting with a toothbrush, I realised I might be avoiding a few things. What I felt most sad about avoiding was writing this blog. 

      
This blog used to be a place I turned to when the writing bug bit. It fulfilled a need to express powerful and not so powerful events in my life. It provided sanctuary for my soul. Then I started writing a book, completed an MA in Creative Writing and what-dya-know, I'm lucky if I write here a few times a year. Though I do blame lack of time (most of my energies are poured into agonising over where to place my next semi-colon), that's not the sole excuse. It's fear. I want to be taken seriously as a writer and so whatever I write and whatever medium I write it in I feel must be worthy of that. Yet when I wrote most on this blog, and best, I think, was when I wasn't worried about being taken seriously. I wrote because I wanted to. 

     
Writing a blog is exposing. Especially when writing about the kinds of things I tend to write about. I always tried to fight the desire to hide behind words - clever words, beautiful words, original language. My blog was rough and tender. It had strange poetry splattered across it. Posts about innocence and galaxies and stalking Bearded Collies along Hove seafront. About sea swimming and dinghies and falling off my bicycle and being rescued by old ladies with purple rinses. About my mother's stroke. My Dad's absence. About toppling into love and crawling back out again. Oh, and I wrote one post whilst on E.

     
My day-to-day life has never been that usual. Which is why I'm bothered to write in the first place.  I don't want to fall into that trap of seeking to please or of trying to be like other writers. Because we are all different breeds of creature. The animal I am can only walk, climb, kill and give birth my way. 
     
I've got a little hidden lately, down in my burrow. Dark eyes to the ground, incubating my babies.

     
So it's time to show myself again.

     
Hello.