Try The Void!

sales pitch

(Credit: noupe.com)

From the void I come, bringing gifts of forgetfulness.

If your eyes have seen things, you wish they had not, throw them in the void!

Throw your painful recollections in the void, I mean. It is much better than a vault. Put your memories in a vault and they might return someday, the vault might leak or be destroyed by meddling pests, but throw something in the void and it’s gone forever.

And it will never fill up!

Throw in anything, your high school years, the death of your sibling, last Christmas, the song too if you want, and the void will remain as empty as when you first stared into it.

And what will it cost you?

Nothing!

That is, there will be a hole of nothing where your discarded memory was, and you might feel it tugging once in a while, especially on lonely nights.

Just remember, you can dispose of anything in the void,

physical things included.

Void

(Credit: Fazboggle from moistmeme.wikia.com)

Bag of Memories

sack

I have a bag of memories which I don’t know what to do with. If I burn them, they will never again warm me as they once did, but as it is now every time I pick them up they scorch my heart. So I suppose I’ll just have to hide them away for a while and hope that the pain fades faster than the sunshine.

Remembrance

English: A simple wind chime

Wind Chime (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I remember the smell of smoke that clung to my grandfather and the sound of his breathing. It sounded like he was trying to pull a hurricane through the eye of a needle. He had a missing finger on his right hand.

 

I remember the spring when I stepped into a bucket of orange paint and left small orange footprints all the way from the front yard to our flat on the second floor and found my big brother. I was crying, but he just laughed at me.

 

I remember the boiling water from the holes on Iceland and how I shied away from all holes in the ground afterwards.

 

And I remember the wind chime on the terrace outside the room where my mother stared into space for hours after my father left for China and I never saw him again, and how the wind chime never seemed to sound as musical as they do in films or are described in books.

 

I remember straying into a dream where I was little red riding hood, and the wolf told me that he was the one who ate my grandfather’s finger.

 

I remember a smell of lavender in a meadow somewhere on the north island of New Zealand, but my brother says I’ve never been there.

The Stampede

Galloping, galloping, galloping through his mind. His memories have joined his thoughts in a stampede, and he tries to tame them, but they roar at him and threaten to eat him up if he does not back out of their way, and the horse of reason under him neighs and rears and the reins are torn from his hands and

He falls.

He falls much too far.

This hole should have had a bottom.

Perhaps it was swallowed by the lion, like that miniature cake he swallowed at his brother’s birthday, oh, he was so sick afterwards, and the cake should have been for his brother only because his brother was allergic to nuts, and the large birthday cake had walnuts on top and hazel nuts in the middle, and he sees the hazel eyes of the woman who stole that small glass bell in that shop where all the assistants were snobs, and she blinked at him, one finger on her narrow, peach coloured lips and he knew it was wrong, but he did not tell anyone, and anyway those snobs had it coming.

 

———————————————-

I was at a writing course this weekend which I’ve wanted to write a post about, but I’ve been too busy with other things.

This text is a result of one of the writing exercises from that course, although of course I’ve edited the raw text a bit. We had to write really fast without thinking about what came out, and then the teacher said some words that we had to use in our writing somehow. Before we began we got the word circus. During the exercise we got the words: lion tamer, cake, kleptomania and glass bell.

I hope you’ll enjoy 🙂

Scrapbook vs Diary

There are memories in my scrapbook. Of places and people I once knew. There are pictures of a dog I once had, and exotic fish from a tropical island which I visited with someone special.

They are all right there on the pages as if they had never changed at all. Time is frozen in my scrapbook.

There are thoughts in my scrapbook. Some of the most beautiful thoughts I ever had are there. Thoughts I shared with strangers, thoughts my best friends shared with me, and thoughts I only ever shared with one particular person.

I will probably never think anything to compare with those thoughts again, but they are all there in my scrapbook.

After the last page in my scrapbook there are about two unrecorded months and then there is my diary.

My diary is my life after the scrapbook. In my diary, time crawls at a snail’s pace.

It has entries like:

What will I need to sleep?

–          A large t-shirt. Very big and so worn and soft that the fabric might rip at any time.

–          Boxer shorts, about half a size too big.

–          Sleepytime-socks. Thick, warm, fuzzy.

–          Eiderdown big enough for two.

–          King-size bed, so that I can toss and turn without falling out. Or at least without falling out of bed before half the night is through.

Do I have these things? Yes. Goodnight.

And details like which hand soap I use and where I shop (it is always the same store), and how often (only when I absolutely have to) and long ramblings about my scrapbook and how my diary is compared to it.

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