There Is A Garden In My Heart Where You Can Sleep Safely.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, from a letter to Jane Williams written in February 1823, featured in The Letters of Mary Shelley

A childs imagination

I was always a daddy’s girl, even after he left.

I remember the day my mum sat me down and told me why he was gone. She didn’t go into detail-just said he couldn’t be around anymore, that it wasn’t safe for us if he stayed. My little brain couldn’t understand, but what I could understand is the fear in her eyes so I stopped asking. Instead I turned to writing. It felt like the only way I could still talk to him.

I wrote letters, simple at first. I sat on my bedroom floor, one hand under my chin and another holding a blue ink ball pen. I’d write about all the things I wish I could tell him if he was here… “dad, today I got 10/10 on my maths test at school” or “we had a Collin the Caterpillar cake for my birthday this year, it’s my favourite. I wish you were here”

I never did send them though, instead I folded them up into tiny little squares and placed them into a red box that had seashells glued on all the edges.

Every birthday he missed, every school play, every holiday where his absence felt like a cold shadow at the dinner table, I wrote. The letters stacked up like little pieces of me I hoped he’d find one day.

One night I sat there, staring at the paper, the pen trembling in my hand. This time, I didn’t write about school or my friends birthday parties or the sleepover I had with my best friend the week before. I wrote what I had been too afraid to say before. “Dad, please be nice to mum so you can come back.” I begged him in that letter like I never had before, hoping somehow that my words would reach wherever he was. I folded it up and placed it in the box that was now overflowing.

A week later he called my mum. He hadn’t done that in years, but there he was, asking about me. She didn’t tell me much, just that he asked how I was doing. It wasn’t much but in my child’s heart it felt like everything.

That’s when I became convinced I had some crazy magical powers. That I resembled the superheroes and magical witches in the shows I watched every weekend.

It just had to be true! How else could the letter I kept in my little red seashell box bring him back? I believed if I kept writing, kept wishing hard enough, praying before bed every night, that he would be able to stay this time. Maybe I was the one who could fix everything and bring my family back together! So I wrote more and more, until my favourite blue pen ran out of ink and my little box was too full of letters that I had to move them to my bedside table drawer.

But my magic wasn’t strong enough.

He left again, just like before. This time though, it hurt a little less. Maybe my magic hadn’t been enough to keep him here, but it had given me something else: strength. The kind that stopped my heart breaking completely.

The years passed, and the box was forgotten about. But I was still a daddy’s girl, even if he never came back in the way I wanted him to.

And in the quiet of my room, with the weight of that box heavy on my shelf, covered in dust, I realised something: my magic wasn’t about bringing him back. It was about learning to live without him.

You were spring except, no you weren’t, you were the leftover winter and the misty summer and the sweetest breeze and the saddest sigh, and the coldest night, and the bare truth incarnate. 

Sometimes, there are friends your parents will always disapprove of, (for good reasons) that life puts in your way, but you cherish all the same, even if they leave, even if they stay, even if they linger in the gaps like the brown of autumn and the spring in the day. 

And maybe I was inadequate summer, searing heat but no bite behind the pain, because really I’d always stayed far too quiet for anyone to care, and maybe she was the opposite, the vengeful winter, the fruitful summer, a forest fire in its entirety, burning down everything as it goes, but I’d always liked to think I was better because I did what they asked but maybe that wasn’t really true because id never know how to cling to things that really care; that really matter. 

Nothing of my world was left but you, and maybe if id lost you too, id go down the deep end so I clung to the only bit of you I had, the memories, the pain, the grief, the sorrow, anything, something, if not for me than for you, because you could hurt me all you like, but you still wouldn’t want me, so now I haunt even your ghost. 

There was a day; an age when you promised not to leave my side ever, and you held up to that oath like it meant more to you than your life, but I cant keep up with you no more now, you ran ahead and left me in the dark, you swore you wouldn’t ever make me your past, but a tragic story is all I am to you now, rotted flesh in an empty grave, flies and bees haunt me in your name, dusty pollen around my head like a halo, I suppose I was only ever a moment in time that you couldn’t really savour. 

i am back, children

— David Cronenberg, Consumed

“I love talking to you, even if I have nothing to say.”

— Mahmoud Darwish

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

— William Faulkner.

Made to love, but not to be loved; made to understand, but not to be understood; always the poet, never the poetry.

Nizar Qabbani // Franz Kafka

— Susan Sontag, from “Death Kit,” (1967) (via lunamonchtuna)