8am. Sunlight. You can’t sleep in. Brilliant blue skies, golden prickly grass. Tractor humming, hay for the cows. You swing, barefoot, on the outside chair, fizzy water in hand.
3pm. The end of a school day. Laughter, crushed grass sweetening the air. Orange pith and apple cores. The soles of your feet are swollen and sore from the heat of the basketball court.
9pm. Splintery logs fall with a clang into the wood box by the pot belly stove. Woollen socks on piles of books. Stewed fruit for dessert.
11pm. You dream. Velvet, the colour of the sky from your childhood. The soft woolly arms of your mother. In the murky space before sleep, your warm hair whispering in your ears makes you think of the ocean in seashells.
The childhood I had is a story that no longer fits my skin. I cannot tell, anymore, the time from which I am writing.
I am lying in the grass, lightheaded from the warm smell of spring. Morning birds call and an excited dog lollops through the trees. My hands are soft, and I am young.
I am on a beach, hair snapping like a lonely flag as I stare out across the burning ocean, trying to see some clarity in an icy sunset. Tears are stinging my frozen cheeks, and wet sand numbing my legs. My fingers are almost too stiff to write my thoughts on an aching page.
I am sprawled on a veranda, music crashing through my open bedroom window as I scribble furiously and break my pen. The angst assaulting the walls of my house echoes the piercings in my ears, shaved head and heavy boots. I have vast ideas that my life does not have the space for, and the frustration is vicious.
There are lovers. There are silhouettes and song lines of bodies, remembered by moonlight, illuminated by sunlight, and stained with wrenching emptiness as the night folds itself around me when they have left. I open up under their gaze, close up under their words, and grow inside so I can change with their faces. I tell myself that I am truly, gloriously, alive – drenched in what it is to feel.
The rings of teacups no longer there lie like prints of years, trailing through diaries and sketches and dusty wooden drawers. These days, a careless drop of tea on a page stops me in my tracks, and I stare, transfixed, trying to see in its opaque depths the story of who I was.
10pm. The neighbourhood is silent. Gum trees in the park across the street are sentinels, guarding a yellow moon in an inky sky. A single light burns by an old rocking chair. There is a sigh, and a settling of a wispy head on the cushioned headrest. Old eyes close.
In the silence, a pen slips from an unfeeling grasp, and settles on the wooden floorboards with echoes of finality.
Melanie Pryor is a writer, musician, teacher and visual artist. Her fiction and poetry has been published in street press and an anthology, and she completed Honours in Creative Writing in 2012. She was also shortlisted for Young Writer-in-Residence at the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Writers’ Centre in 2012.
