(no subject)
If I were ever to die of spiderbite, my last words would be 'Fucking hell! Fuck you, fucking spider!' I know this because this was my automatic response in church with my grandmother yesterday upon finding one such creature making its way along my arm (and momentarily through the air). I also jumped up with a gesture that my brother has made into a little dance, much like the one in MJ's 'Thriller', but speeded up.
Yes, it is hypocritical for me to be in church. No, she does not realise this, although she is beginning to suspect that it may at least be futile.
Apologies for delaying this post, but there was the problem of no alcohol or droogs in the house, as well as the new series of Lost on terrestrial. I watched the first three hour-long episodes while recording them, and then rewound and watched them straight through again. I regret nothing.
I may be gone from LJ for several weeks because I have to revise for my A-levels. However, let me put you in the hands of sarah_sinclair, whose journal you should go and visit RIGHT NOW. This final freestyle is dedicated to her:
Whistling For Tea
I called, and my screaming was ruptured by the howling of the wind, my voice falling back against my face with the flakes of spiralling snow. No matter which direction I walked in, no black shape met me, and I became aware that I had truly become separated from the group. The storm encased me, filling in my footsteps, and the thin veneer of snow falling seemed to advance upon me until it was a moving screen shifting before and above my powdered eyelids. Snow-blindness began to set in, and I saw my hands and feet disappear into the snow until I stumbled invisibly in the whiteness, separated only by the alien beating of my surrogate heart. The tearing of the wind in my ears became like the beating of a torn tambourine, and behind it, silence.
Suddenly, I stumbled into the solid mass of a rustic stone wall, leaning outwards against the weight of my weak body like some eternally rising cliff. At first I feared it signalled the end of my remaining senses, but as I felt my way along it hopelessly I apprehended the shape of a door and beat upon it, shouting into the silence like a leper drowning in water he could not feel. The coldness was unbearable, and as the movements of my body slowed down, I felt as from a great distance my body beginning to die, crucified on the rack of this narrow portal by the savage storm rattling in the edges of my skull. And then the door opened and I fell in to warmth and darkness, the frozen, bloody tears on my cheeks shattering on the flagstones of the floor. I felt myself guided by another body into the depths of a chair, where I felt great folds of cloth be swathed around me and the heat of a roaring fire on my icy face. In a little while the shadows of the room blossomed into shimmering lines and then burst into husky shapes before my feverish eyes.
I looked around the room. There were palm leaves arranged over the fireplace, encased in a rood-like screen of gauze lily patterns casting shadows onto the four beams in the ceiling, from which crooked nails protruded like thorns. My host was a withered old lady with a willowy face and hands like twisted roots and she wore a bed gown of deep Fillippo Lippi blue. Her skin cracked and folded as she moved, in deep lines that broke the flat light into crevices and made bright rims chase over her like the tawny linings of clouds. She spoke to me but I could not understand; she seemed to accept this and lapsed into warm silence, her smile etched in chiaroscuro tones into her parchment-pale skin. I could not move; sweating in my fever, I twisted and turned into my dreams, falling between tangible memories and the strange unreality of each waking altar.
She pressed cups of steaming tea to my blind, trembling lips and I drank it gladly, ignoring my blistering tongue as a useless and languid thing. As the hours wore on my soul was deflowered and I drank off the lip of her cup as my raging heart was torn into tangled cusps. As my slavish strength grew I noticed that the room was square and lacked entrances, save the one which I had come through. There was a square hole in one of the walls which the old lady approached whenever I finished a cup of tea; there, I saw her purse her lips and blow. She would blow for some time, and changes in the shape of her lips denoted a tune, rootless in the whorls of my wind-deafened ears. Sometimes she made a mistake, and frowned and began to whistle again: mostly however she was rewarded by a pot of boiling tea. As I further began to take note of my surroundings I noticed that she served no tea to her self; as I began to grow a little strength she became wispy and her eyes became ghostlike; she turned her head heavenwards like a martyr and she smiled. It came to me then that she had simply been waiting for some human company to die in; I panicked and began to speak to her, then, but she could not reach me from the thoughtless, haunted realms in which she now floated. Then she died, and the light fell from her face as she slid slightly forward in her chair and stayed like some bowed trunk in the starless forest of my nightmare.
Now I remain, having crawled through the dark room to the hole in the wall, where I try to remember every tune I know but to no avail. Now I remain, and I feel my voice fade as my soul drifts through me like fingertips brushing a blackened mirror and my cold-lidded eyes have no more tears. Now I remain, and the dimmed, mute world encloses me as I crouch in the darkness, beating with my hands against the wall, pleading with that inhuman force on the other side of the wall, pursing my frozen, blistered lips, whistling for tea.
Yes, it is hypocritical for me to be in church. No, she does not realise this, although she is beginning to suspect that it may at least be futile.
Apologies for delaying this post, but there was the problem of no alcohol or droogs in the house, as well as the new series of Lost on terrestrial. I watched the first three hour-long episodes while recording them, and then rewound and watched them straight through again. I regret nothing.
I may be gone from LJ for several weeks because I have to revise for my A-levels. However, let me put you in the hands of sarah_sinclair, whose journal you should go and visit RIGHT NOW. This final freestyle is dedicated to her:
Whistling For Tea
I called, and my screaming was ruptured by the howling of the wind, my voice falling back against my face with the flakes of spiralling snow. No matter which direction I walked in, no black shape met me, and I became aware that I had truly become separated from the group. The storm encased me, filling in my footsteps, and the thin veneer of snow falling seemed to advance upon me until it was a moving screen shifting before and above my powdered eyelids. Snow-blindness began to set in, and I saw my hands and feet disappear into the snow until I stumbled invisibly in the whiteness, separated only by the alien beating of my surrogate heart. The tearing of the wind in my ears became like the beating of a torn tambourine, and behind it, silence.
Suddenly, I stumbled into the solid mass of a rustic stone wall, leaning outwards against the weight of my weak body like some eternally rising cliff. At first I feared it signalled the end of my remaining senses, but as I felt my way along it hopelessly I apprehended the shape of a door and beat upon it, shouting into the silence like a leper drowning in water he could not feel. The coldness was unbearable, and as the movements of my body slowed down, I felt as from a great distance my body beginning to die, crucified on the rack of this narrow portal by the savage storm rattling in the edges of my skull. And then the door opened and I fell in to warmth and darkness, the frozen, bloody tears on my cheeks shattering on the flagstones of the floor. I felt myself guided by another body into the depths of a chair, where I felt great folds of cloth be swathed around me and the heat of a roaring fire on my icy face. In a little while the shadows of the room blossomed into shimmering lines and then burst into husky shapes before my feverish eyes.
I looked around the room. There were palm leaves arranged over the fireplace, encased in a rood-like screen of gauze lily patterns casting shadows onto the four beams in the ceiling, from which crooked nails protruded like thorns. My host was a withered old lady with a willowy face and hands like twisted roots and she wore a bed gown of deep Fillippo Lippi blue. Her skin cracked and folded as she moved, in deep lines that broke the flat light into crevices and made bright rims chase over her like the tawny linings of clouds. She spoke to me but I could not understand; she seemed to accept this and lapsed into warm silence, her smile etched in chiaroscuro tones into her parchment-pale skin. I could not move; sweating in my fever, I twisted and turned into my dreams, falling between tangible memories and the strange unreality of each waking altar.
She pressed cups of steaming tea to my blind, trembling lips and I drank it gladly, ignoring my blistering tongue as a useless and languid thing. As the hours wore on my soul was deflowered and I drank off the lip of her cup as my raging heart was torn into tangled cusps. As my slavish strength grew I noticed that the room was square and lacked entrances, save the one which I had come through. There was a square hole in one of the walls which the old lady approached whenever I finished a cup of tea; there, I saw her purse her lips and blow. She would blow for some time, and changes in the shape of her lips denoted a tune, rootless in the whorls of my wind-deafened ears. Sometimes she made a mistake, and frowned and began to whistle again: mostly however she was rewarded by a pot of boiling tea. As I further began to take note of my surroundings I noticed that she served no tea to her self; as I began to grow a little strength she became wispy and her eyes became ghostlike; she turned her head heavenwards like a martyr and she smiled. It came to me then that she had simply been waiting for some human company to die in; I panicked and began to speak to her, then, but she could not reach me from the thoughtless, haunted realms in which she now floated. Then she died, and the light fell from her face as she slid slightly forward in her chair and stayed like some bowed trunk in the starless forest of my nightmare.
Now I remain, having crawled through the dark room to the hole in the wall, where I try to remember every tune I know but to no avail. Now I remain, and I feel my voice fade as my soul drifts through me like fingertips brushing a blackened mirror and my cold-lidded eyes have no more tears. Now I remain, and the dimmed, mute world encloses me as I crouch in the darkness, beating with my hands against the wall, pleading with that inhuman force on the other side of the wall, pursing my frozen, blistered lips, whistling for tea.