Impulse writing
Impulse writing while listening to Jon Hopkins. 260 words.
Disclaimer: Teenage-style-emo, stream-of-consciousness type 'editing', no beta, no claim of sense-making... here for my records.
Music comes first.
Music should always come first.
It was a long time before I realised there was no home, no hope, nothing to go back to. Nothing to walk forward to but the distant line of the horizon. Even that realisation was a long time after the car broke down, after people stopped stopping to give me lifts, to lean across their passenger seats and say: ‘you need a lift, sweetheart?’ or love, or girlie, or honey. The epithets changed in a slow migration pattern the further east I went. East toward the sun, with my afternoon shadow stretching out before me. Bad luck to step on your own shadow, my grandmother would say, and I’d try for hours, trying to jump on it, only to watch it leap away and reattach to my feet, untouchable, but forever there, a part of me.
But it always came back to the music, the swell of it, and the cadence and the runs. Piano at my grandmother’s with her faded carpets and windowsills of nick-knacks and the dust motes floating in the air. Guitar at Lucia’s, and the hours she wouldn’t spend teaching me to play. C, A, D, E. The tips of my fingers with the aching burn, and the metallic taste of steel, and under that the smell and taste of her cunt.
Mum’s house, silent most of the time, and Dad’s house, with the radio. A soullessness, and no understanding of why I left. Of the rumblings under the surface, of wanting anything, anything but this.
Disclaimer: Teenage-style-emo, stream-of-consciousness type 'editing', no beta, no claim of sense-making... here for my records.
Music comes first.
Music should always come first.
It was a long time before I realised there was no home, no hope, nothing to go back to. Nothing to walk forward to but the distant line of the horizon. Even that realisation was a long time after the car broke down, after people stopped stopping to give me lifts, to lean across their passenger seats and say: ‘you need a lift, sweetheart?’ or love, or girlie, or honey. The epithets changed in a slow migration pattern the further east I went. East toward the sun, with my afternoon shadow stretching out before me. Bad luck to step on your own shadow, my grandmother would say, and I’d try for hours, trying to jump on it, only to watch it leap away and reattach to my feet, untouchable, but forever there, a part of me.
But it always came back to the music, the swell of it, and the cadence and the runs. Piano at my grandmother’s with her faded carpets and windowsills of nick-knacks and the dust motes floating in the air. Guitar at Lucia’s, and the hours she wouldn’t spend teaching me to play. C, A, D, E. The tips of my fingers with the aching burn, and the metallic taste of steel, and under that the smell and taste of her cunt.
Mum’s house, silent most of the time, and Dad’s house, with the radio. A soullessness, and no understanding of why I left. Of the rumblings under the surface, of wanting anything, anything but this.