I took up my chisel and spent decades learning to sculpt. I watched masters and amateurs, stopped and started, erred and marvelled, sometimes channeling the divine and sometimes chipping it astray. Often, I would simply look at the flecks of my efforts strewn to the ground. Often, I would cry for these scrapped carvings, wondering if my work would ever be done, my mind’s eye always in defiance. One day I showed you my labours, not exactly satisfied but contented by my efforts. ‘I love what you are making,’ you said, ‘but I really love what it’s made from.’
I have to say it while she’s calm so I might get heard. You make me feel disentitled to my opinion. She doesn’t look at me, ‘Is disentitled a word?’ I think so. ‘And that’s your opinion?’ That’s condescending. ‘No sweetie, that was patronising. This conversation is me condescending.’ You fucking strip me of my humanity and then blame me for being a zombie, like a proper voodoo puppet for you to play with. I feel like I’ve been shot and asked to pay for the medical expenses. ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she says, ‘we both know you couldn’t afford that.’
I keep dropping your brain on people that don’t even know you. Yeah, I say, you were telling me about that the other day, or showed me this article, or read it, said it, did it… All the things you know and do in my conversations; depth, breadth and dimensions, I only wish it were truly you and not just your thought. Actually, I was telling my friends only the other day about how you’d said that or something similar, I think. Funny, I can’t quite remember now, I’ll have to ask you next time I talk to someone.
I’m standing with strangers, near enough to one myself but not for the charms in my pocket and graces of fate, watching her play a piano in the street, beaten old upright been community curbed, loose a few boards, some keys, and an octave or three. She lays out a film score near to denouement, full of latter act arpeggiation here played as prelude. As the piece unfurls she pours herself into the sound until she is no longer conscious of how impressive she is, merely the pressure of the keys, the rhythm and its needs. My heart sings.
Sharing space together but me separating myself by insecurities, an evolutionary vestige still clinging to my chrysalis. You know, it’s not always going to be sonnets and sunshine, I say. There might be times where it’s gloom too, and grey. Arris smiles with her eyes and opens her mouth wide, unleashing a kaleidoscope of butterflies. They flock around the room, flutter, flap, and fill every available space, countless wings in the colour of all things beating their response upon the stillness in the air, a chaotic order of magnitude. So, I say, it doesn’t matter? And the butterflies abate.
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A Few Short Words 