A-Z

V is for vast open spaces: Go out into nature. A forest, the woods, the veld, your local park. Anywhere where there is grass and shrubs will do. The painter David Hockney said: “To get something fresh you have to go back to nature . . . You can’t be tired of nature. It is just our way of looking at it that we are tired of. So get a new way of looking at it.” Write and meditate until you get a new way of looking at nature. If you’ve never hugged a tree, now’s the time.

It was blindingly cold and almost deathly silent. I’d never seen it before but it could kill, it has killed, hasn’t it?

There was nowhere to go, no heat to find, nothing to help me out of the hell I decided was now my own. It seemed this was the way to go, the way I leave this, all this space. The cold grasping at my skin, searing itself into my veins. I needed to find the warmth of summer once more but it seemed so very far, so very out of my reach.

I ran in this tundra cold I needed shelter I needed to run, the cold had grasped me and I was going to die because it never let go, that was what it did when the summer love was gone.

The only thing left was the cold.


Emerit had yet to come back, the desolate wasteland out there wasn’t for exploring but Emerit could just never sit still, resembling a fairy she continued to run around and peak out windows, peak the door open to pear outside, collect (hoard) more supplies than she knew how to organize and lit for fires than she had water to put out with. She decided to use snow instead, the idiot.

The cold didn’t just strip the flesh from peoples skin and decide to leave their bones for the next poor scavengers to collect. It crept into your skin no matter how insulated you were if you spent enough time with the wind and the radioactive snow it would kill you.

Emerit had time frames where she was allowed outside, before the snow sneaked up on her and murdered her insulation, before she noticed she was cold enough to start finding shelter she was supposed to be inside.

This didn’t always happen though, Emerit was Emerit the usually annoying fairy that tried to hard to never let anything bother her. She worried everyone in the small shielded communities. They whispered of her behind her back, like the wind it all passed through one ear and out the other, he mind, Eileen thought was as vast and empty as the plains outside.

She snorted into the her and gazed out the window again looking for a sign of her charge out in the vast wilderness beyond the shield borders. She didn’t find her and just sighed looking back at her cup, maybe in a bit she would go out, for now the wind didn’t need her attention and she could enjoy a tiny taste of summers love for a bit more.

 

N is for nursery: Choose a plant and write about it. Write about where it sits and what’s next
to it. Write about this plant as you would about a new pet you’re about to take home. Ask yourself: What will it be like when it grows? How well will you take care of it? Who else will care for it?
Take it home and keep a regular diary about its development.

Everything around me took no notice from me, I wasn’t interested in things that I couldn’t have, well more like I chose to ignore them. But wandering around was getting to be more than a little boring, my brain needed to do something more than look at different leaves and beautifully crafted plants so I decided to pick one. I might just buy, something small, easy to pick up, or maybe the one that really catch’s my eye.

I stepped toward the bursts of color around the far side of the nursery  perhaps there I might find something but even there everything looked like something that wouldn’t last long in my room or anywhere in my house.

I knew I would claim to look after it, saying its mine, I bought it. I would claim to look after it when really my mother would take it and care for it. She was the one with the green thumb after all.

But I had decided this would be a new plant of mine after all.


It honestly didn’t live long, I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought it, a week in and the leaves start to droop, two weeks and the cat pees in the dirt, we decided to just throw it out after that, I was thinking of selling the cat after that.

My mom had ended up taking care of the little thing and I didn’t really forget about it, I think that was the problem really, It was very over watered and sometimes I left the window open and the poor thing would fall over from the wind and I’d have to clean up dirt off my carpet.

My mother was a much better caretaker, she actually painted the pot that she put it in too, she was very good at that artistic thing as well, many things suited her. The pots for all her plants were painted and sometimes she would sell on eBay or Kijiji and make some extra money off that, my mom was a great plant sitter.

The one thing I do remember happening with my plant was that it never grew any flowers and my sister honestly didn’t like it much, or me, she was always all like “your going the kill it,” “its never going to last,” “why did you even pick it up, just give it to mommy.” Like gee negative Nancy much? She was right in the end and it really inflated her ego but honestly the plant dying was more the cats fault than mine, so there.

 

C is for cinema: Create a map of the cinema as you rush to your seat. Approach it as if it were a town or a village. Explore the past (the dead), the present (nature), and the future (this place in 100 years time). Start with the word “dead” and end your piece with the word “life” (or the opposite way round).

Dead were their eyes, the ones that were already there, they had seen the movie before and are only inside because they snuck in, they couldn’t sneak the money past their parents though.

They watch without seeing. An escape in a theater is just the best part of watching a movie. Its sometimes all the life they have. Sitting here in the farthest back corner, not even in the middle where, like a town square its packed with people.

No the back was a refuge a place for people who needed it. Who were to knew to bare being with others.

This was not a place filled with life.