Spaces

We point fingers at the void and say guilty. We place blame everywhere it doesn't belong. The void between people given a human shape. We carry each other in the broken edges. We are missing the corner piece with the sun and a patch of sky. The spaces between are malevolent yet empty.

Oyster.

Any flaw can be made into a strength, any strength can be turned into a weakness. A sharp tongue cuts even in compliment, a sharp mind cuts deeper still. We bleed from unspoken words, the wounds accidental and often self-inflicted.

We take the pain, spin a pearl around it, and learn to live with it. We wear it as a badge of honour.

Survivor.

Façade

Nothing is truly lost, only buried. She remembers everything, she just can't always tell the difference between what's real and what's not. She was always looking over her own shoulder, expecting the impossible from her.

Comedy and tragedy are the same. Clowns are supposed to be frightening, they embody chaos. Their face is their make up and removable, but the skin underneath is also a mask. Pull away the skin and you find yet another grinning face.

Acting is about hiding under the layers of character and artifice, writing is about being honest. She tells stories, some of them just happen to be true.

The Other

It seemed to start as a conversation that took place inside her head; a simple way of working out what she thought. But who exactly was the person doing the thinking? And who exactly was she talking to? Whatever she thought it seemed the other thought the opposite.

She wanted to listen to the other self, because the things the other said made sense to her but were horrible things to say. She knew that the other was a part of her, but didn’t want it. She wanted to fight it away, to destroy it so it wouldn’t whisper any more.

She waged war on the inside of her head; the brain her battlefield, the voices her soldiers. She stopped sleeping, eating and drinking, stopped living. She fought her thoughts and beat them all. And then she stopped thinking.

That was when the other spoke clearly: “Stop hurting me, I am you.”

Imago

At first it just seemed like a lack of self-confidence; a little shyness, a little social anxiety or low self-esteem, perhaps. Then there was a difficulty about being seen in public and she knew she was making herself inaccessible to other people, but didn’t know how to stop.

She wanted to just get everything over with, but she was never truly self-destructive. She flirted with the idea of suicide sometimes, the way other girls would flirt with pin-ups of movie stars. She was fascinated by pain and what made people hurt, and how to stop it, but there didn’t seem to be a reason.

Then came the first coup de foudre, the unbidden flood of ideas. Perhaps they had always been there, perhaps it was more gradual than she’d thought, but now these ideas wouldn’t go away. Everything she wanted to keep inside spilled out, every secret she’d been told to keep was given up, and every confidence was betrayed.

A flood of memory, both real and imaginary besieged her. She had wanted to sever all ties to her past, to be re-imagined as someone else, someone whole. Instead she got lost in her past, only now she couldn’t remember what was real.