Memoirs of a Life Unlived

I made an error, sweet and true: compared my shambled self to you with all your wondrous purple prose, with all your quotes from works I chose to try and read when I was young, whose sentences I chewed too long until the taste had disappeared and meaning long since discohered [you see, I know that's not a word but must continue, undeterred.] You're less than half my age, you brute! How dare you flow, and cite, and loot my less-than-sturdy self-esteem? Like MLK I have a dream in which Young Turks and parvenus are more like me and less like you and cut their teeth at 22 instead of shining brightly through and I shall write, as critics cheer, a piece about a disco here.

With the flowers in full bloom - eyes smarting from pollen fogging the room - she wills the day over. For days she’s seen tomorrow as a stand-alone, no more that deep-breathing stranger on the phone. Clear lines, clean minds; she stays alert to the face at the window very soon. It feels wrong being in the midst neither of anticipation nor the blitz relief will bring when tomorrow arrives. She’s been everywhere but standing still. Memories and projections make her ill: bad thoughts, stock still. She writhes but can’t break free of the way time just sits. There’s no control in a photograph: no sounds, no hot and cold, no way to craft one moment seamlessly into the next. She’s dreamed in film all her life, knows the subtlety of shade from mum to wife and now, at last, she packs up everything she was into the tallest glass.

The hot gun moves through ice printing a perfect outline of itself, or else a legacy of change to solid uniform things - aspirational reminder of what they may become.