The following are excerpts and sketches from my creative journal. I try to sit somewhere a few times a week and just write what comes to mind. What comes out is usually sketches in words. Feelings. Things that moved me. Moments. I record quotes, sometimes. These are from the summer, which was mostly spent working on my Masters in Wales.
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. – Jack Kerouac
13/08/2024
The air is warm as honey in the heatwave. London does not sizzle, it marinates: sticky and slow. I stay inside with the curtains drawn and the tick-tick sound of the fan turning over the turgid air. I stare into shadows moving on the ceiling, filling the corners of the room with shapes. Watch a bee run headfirst in frustration into the window again and again. Stuck inside with nowhere else to go, my thoughts do the same. Bang. Bang. Bang into the walls and windows.
Eventually, the humidity is worse inside than out. I tumble myself onto hot, brown grass, crisp and sharp beneath the soft soles of my feet. Lie down under a musically pink sunset and stare up into the kaleidoscopic, shifting images painted on the sky by the branches of the old plum tree in my grandparents’ garden. Watch fat, green dragonflies skim invisible currents on the air to the sighs of overheated doves on the roof. Flip my phone over: blank screen, no messages. Drown my feelings in a bottle of wine, like flies in vinegar.
The heat makes my skin itch. I feel like a specimen in a lab, trapped under hot glass. The air is too heavy to breathe.
Time to pack again. Time to go.
24/08/2024
Foamy, white horses dance across a turquoise-grey sea. The mountains are hazy in the distance, purple in their coats of summer heather. They are soft pencil lines, broad strokes on the horizon. In front of them, the white fairy houses of the city and a black ribbon of road with toy cars put-putting along it. I comb my fingers through round, water-washed pebbles. A crumbling bird’s skull with perfectly cleaned, ivory edges, is half buried in the shingle. A desiccated strand of bladderwrack, black and forked, fronded with flower-like, air-filled pustules, tumbles passed me on the wind. The gulls above me shriek, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing. The relief.
26/08/2024
The mountains are smudged by fog behind Caernarfon this morning. Ghostly, jagged bruises the shape of the teeth marks you left on my breast. The tides shifted when the winds died down. I breathe in the sun. The gulls know first about the changes. They come to fish. To catch up on gossip. Little white and grey dots bobbing on the surface of the water, their calls competing with the sound of the dragging of waves on a stony shore. I stack rocks: heart-shaped, this one a little cracked, that one amorphous; one the size of my fist, perfectly round and speckled with air holes; a white quartz shot through with black veins like a map.
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time. – Sylvia Plath
No Date. Working Title: Xanax and the Sea
I feel numb. I feel like I’m floating through reflections in a great, black bowl. The water is cold and dark and nebulous, half-seen creatures I don’t understand, my mind can’t comprehend, can’t make sense of, float in the vast depths beneath me. They’re probably important, but I don’t want to look. I can’t seem to get up. To get out of the water. I don’t know if I want to do that, either. Every once in a while, a wave washes me up, and I drag my skin on the shore until I’m bruised and bleeding. Until the water comes again to claim me.
When I raise my head, the world is too bright. Technicolour that shifts like a cinema screen. Old film, digitally remastered. This is Oz. The man behind the curtain. The witch crushed by the weight of a house that crumbled around her, no matter how hard she tried to keep it up. The yellow brick road, writhing like a golden snake, stretches away into eternity through fields shiny as a new, green penny. Not quite real.
It’s all too bright. Close my eyes and go back to dreaming.
