this question has been sitting with me for as long as i can remember...
who's Right is right?
why is my Right wrong to those around me?
my family {love them to bits but...} have a knack of making me feel that i don't really know about the Realities of Life, how i should Cope with stuff, that i live in some sort of fairy-land, waiting for Miracles to Happen... this has been their fear, i suppose, when i told them about the imminent break-up with me and Mr G. they've seen him as my Saviour - without him i would've carried on floundering, i would've been treading water until god knows when...
maybe i would've... maybe i would've carried on not really knowing what to do, how to make the move away from them, but the thing is - that didn't happen... i did meet Other Half, i did learn truck-loads of stuff, about life and how to cope with stuff, cos i have... the past twenty-odd years i've managed, i've found answers inside myself, i tapped into the immense resource that is my intuition, or whatever it's called, and the fear that used to take over, the panic, and the despair have subsided. they made room for Trust and Faith... in Me... in Life... in The Universe...
but they still won't see that...
they still assume that as soon as Mr G moves out, i'll crumble...
cos i don't know much about the Realities of being a Single Parent...
and i can't just keep thinking that Miracles will happen...
but i also see that they seem to relish Disaster... any one they see, they'll home into... personal disaster {my brother and his family, my auntie and her incurable disease, a friend who's daughter's baby has a problem}, national disaster {crashing air planes, the financial market}, international ones - it's all they can talk about... not the beautiful things that happen - my auntie who's found new love, my brother who's found a way to deal with his situation, the strength the friend's daughter seems to have found, somewhere deep inside - the miracles, the sunny sides. in the face of that, my reality is invisible to them...
my reality is fine. it's mine, it's what it is.
and i believe in Miracles, cos they Happen.
all the time.
you just need to be able to see them...
{one happened in June, when i got to see these guys play live, and i remembered what Happiness, Intense Joy and Ecstasy felt like...}
back to an old love of mine, one that seemed to spring on me in a time when the music that came out of my radio was absolute rubbish, in my eyes... can't exactly remember how i discovered them, but i do remember the feeling of having discovered a BAND that made songs that had an energy that i understood, sang about things that meant something to me, had a worldliness that i wished i possessed... and the singer...
i don't like falling into a kind of nostalgia for my teenage, cos i don't feel it, but when i hear music from this lot, it just happens... ...orange crush
{from Green, the album that blew me of my feet...}
...so. central rain
{from a time when hardly anybody knew them, apart form a handful of art students in America, a time when Michael Stipe still had hair...}
short story, about a fantasy i've been having since the end of November...
partly real life, partly my imagination gone wild
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She took the first available seat without a reserved sticker on it, in carriage 6. Most of them had, and Lucy spotted a four-seater with a table in between, plonking the big rucksack under the small table, noticing a figure in the seat near the window. The man, professional looking, slightly annoyed that his state of peace had been curtailed, gave her a pleasant smile, which she answered with one of her own. She sat down after she'd taken her coat off and enjoyed a few moments of calm. The wait for the delayed train had been long, despite standing in the main hall of Kings Cross Station being fun, listening to the conversations by people near her was enjoyable, and the notion that many of the trains on the boards were leaving for Edinburgh, or Aberdeen, filled her with a mild form of excitement. Places that she'd wanted to go to as well. One time. When arranging it wouldn't be the hassle that this trip had proved. Lucy checked the display of her phone, to see if anybody had been trying to contact her in the time it had taken her to go from the waiting hall to the seat she was in now but there was nothing. The train slowly juddered itself into motion, and she knew that it would take at least another hour and a quarter before it was going to halt again, so she placed the phone on the table in front of her and intended to make herself as comfortable as possible. The man next to her had taken his laptop out and waited for the wireless internet connection to be established. The young woman in the seat near the window on the other side of the isle was listening to music; tinny rhythms drifted through the air, and she tapped her fingers on the window sill.
The seats opposite weren't taken, despite the claim made by the bits of paper on the headrest. "I'll do you a deal," she suddenly heard the man next to her say, "I'll take that chair over there in a bit if nobody else does. I'll give it ten more minutes." His smile was winning, and she nodded. "Can't see why not." They carried on in silence for a while, in which nobody but an elderly woman wandered along, looking for the coffee carriage, and Lucy let the sound of the voice that had just spoken to her bounce around her head. It was a nice voice, with an accent that she hadn't heard much before. Apart form a children's programme that her oldest son used to watch, years and years before. Northern, Yorkshire probably, seen as that's where the train was heading for. Nine minutes later the man grabbed his laptop, turned it to face the chair opposite him, grabbed his jacket and scarf, and waited for Lucy to get up and make enough space for him to squeeze through. Another smile adorned his face, but she felt too shy to keep looking his way. She hadn't, apart form staring at London which rolled past the window he was sitting next to, lights coming from office windows, then houses, shops, petrol stations, and slowly there was darkness. She didn't want to make him think that she was trying to work out what he was doing on that laptop. Though she had been curious enough to consider it.
