This short piece is based on a writing competition, the only criteria was that it began with the utterance, 'stop! and that it was max 1000 words.
***
‘Stop!’
I heard the word coming from somewhere in the room. I was dimly aware of hazy lights and the
taste of blood and a blue light flashing outside. It had such depth, that word, ‘stop’. It had come deep from someone’s belly, sinew,
bones. It was drawn out, elongated; infused
with alcohol, fear, drugs, adrenaline.
Someone must be badly hurt, I thought, dimly. I could feel my heartbeat; from outside, the
blue light seemed to synch up with it.
My body felt as though it was pulsating with light and heat and smoke
and the dull pounding of music coming from the black speaker that some random girl
had fallen asleep on.
***
I worked two jobs when I moved back home. I was working in an office by day, and at
night I’d work in a small nightclub that had just opened in town. I’d get in and it would be like the buttoned-upness
of the day just dissolved around me and I could feel like myself again. My armour, my guarded self that I reserved
for the office, could come undone even though I wasn’t drinking. And I came undone in a heartbeat; feeling
alive immersed in music.
***
I liked to meet up with a fabulous lady who I first bumped
into trying to traverse the intersection of Park Avenue South and East 23rd
Street; she guided me with much humour through what seemed like certain death
when I first moved to New York 10 years ago.
Ellie was about 70 and only wore the colour green. Green hair, green handbag, green clothes. I loved her spirit in a world where
expressing your spirit seemed hard. She
taught me to care less. Not about my
goals, oh no! But to pursue them with
passion with room for life. Because
single-minded people grew mouldy, she’d say with a wry smile. You have to keep room for life. And she just sparkled with life.
I was swallowed up in New York, just like I thought I would
be. I’d made myself go because all my
friends had travelled and I wanted something new to eat up all the stagnant
stuff I felt inside. I desperately
wanted, needed, something that felt fresh and alive, but New York seemed only a
sprawling mass of bodies that were trying to shield themselves from even their
own souls. I became lost; and having
dropped out of law school, feeling small, I headed back to the same small city,
Salisbury in England, 10 years after I’d left – only now the need to feel fresh
felt more urgent, because my world was shrunk further in this place that
offered both solace in green spaces and yet also suffocated me.
Back home I bought a pink bible to try to get my head around
religion, because, although agnostic, there was something compelling still
inside religious stories. Then I lost
my heart to a guy who was neither boy nor man but both. I kept going back and couldn’t leave. Being with him felt both perfectly right and
wrong, at the same time. It wasn’t black
or white. He’d bought so much to my life
but everything has a price and he’d taken most of my sanity. I carried him in my heart still, often sleeping
while holding my stomach the way that the way he used to. Like no man on earth had held me before.
***
I lived back with my parents – this was before my Mum became
assailed with dementia and I saw the person I’d loved stolen away in patches of
uncertainty and fear creep around her eyes.
And before I became starkly aware of my Dad’s mortality. I wanted to live but the part of me that had
always been tentative, living on the sidelines, didn’t quite know how to plunge
in and I became afraid again.
***
I remember seeing a girl post a selfie of herself singing in
her car on Facebook. Two minutes later
she died. It seemed to hit me harder
than larger tragedies like plane crashes or earthquakes. I realised why – she was just a girl at the
top of her game, expressing happiness (albeit dangerously). But the happiness she felt didn’t, couldn’t,
offer her any armour to put off, death.
No matter how beautiful she was.
No matter how beautiful her plans.
***
I had so many plans.
I’d wanted to write; ever since I’d ripped off the book ‘Watership Down’
– badly – by writing about a family of mice, aged 12. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t but somehow
life and my lack of discipline had intervened.
I wanted to paint, too. I’ve never
been properly trained and my Dad teasingly likened my version of Klimpt’s ‘the
Kiss’ to a ‘Byzantine turd’. I found it funny but I didn’t care if it was a bit amateurish. I was happy just to lose myself in paint like
a form of meditation. And I wanted to
marry again.
***
I remember when I was a kid; a flash of a memory. My Mum sporting a wicked hairstyle, all 60s
it was. She’d had long hair before then,
but that night when she peered into my cot, she’d had a radical purple bob, cut
sharply to frame her face. This new groovy
lady had swallowed up the comfy ‘Mum’archetype; my comfort zone transgressed.
***
‘Stop’.
-- A flash, a pulse
--
‘Stop’…
I was still floating in the heat and the blue pulsing light
and the smoke but I became aware that I’d been taken into an ambulance – time
was all disjointed. This last time,
‘stop’ had been uttered softly, gently, by a lady with sea green eyes – made me
think of Ellie. The resuscitation
paddles hung in the air, held in suspended animation by her colleague for a
second or two. I watched, wordlessly as
they retreated, and the room went dark and blinked out of existence.
‘Stop’, she whispered, once more.