Gone Huggin’

Taken the first time I stepped onto hallowed Vegas land.

So here’s the thing. I know this blog has been ass-deep in tumbleweeds since the end of Scintilla and I’m sorry. I present to you these reasons three:

1. A few of my favourite people at work have departed for pastures new which, along with the fact that there is a ton to be done and morale currently resembles Ja Rule’s career, has left me decidedly unmotivated to write here.
2. I have been channelling what little creative energy I have into the second draft of the novel I’ve been writing since the dawn of time.* The writing process has been going so well that I have actually been feeling less like I want to lacerate my face with a broken plate and more like this could actually be a thing a couple of people might want to read.
3. All my enthusiasm and excitement for life has been channelled into the trip I am taking to the States in less than 48 hours.

Yes, in two days’ time, I will be meeting 67 bloggers for shenanigans, hijinks and general hilarity in 40-degree heat (Celsius) and I couldn’t be more excited/thrilled/terrified. The introvert in me wants to have a long talk about boundaries and going to sleep at a decent hour but I am feeding her Valium and hoping she will just give it a rest until the weekend is over. This is a long way from the Christian youth conferences I attended in my youth: here, the debauchery can take place in broad daylight.

I also get to hang out a little longer in Vegas with my sister, Yawps and Brandee before heading to New York where I get to eat BBQ with a warmongering smurf, have brunch with a kindred, and convene with some of my favourite people.

This holiday has been a long time coming and my apprehension is paired with relief that it is finally here and the probability of me backhanding someone for something paltry are greatly reduced. I’m going to use this time to overcome some insecurities, fling my arms around people I have wanted to hug since discovering them, eat food that cannot be found in the UK and indulge my Bath & Body Works penchant.

I’ll holla when I’m back.

* exaggeration

And Again…

I didn’t instagram it but it certainly has a place here.

Let’s meet, he says, apropos of nothing and despite the fact that it’s been nigh on six years since we spoke properly. We have drifted apart in that perplexing way where suddenly you open your eyes and realise that your weekly calls had at some point become fortnightly and then slipped into vague texts once every few months before fading out altogether. When I ask him why now he says I found your twitter page and we laugh for a little while about how London has robbed me of my Northern calm. Let’s meet, he says again gently; he knows I am around for Easter and in his words “it would be nice.”

Curiosity gets the better of me and I acquiesce.

We meet at the field we used to walk together on Friday nights. He is wearing a blue scarf and a smile that erases the space between us. The ground is soft enough that my shoe sinks a little too deep and he offers me his arm and pulls me free. We tread carefully and begin our first lap of the field. I bundle up my nervousness and leave it on the knoll where we used to hold hands and roll down on the last day of school. Time cartwheels away from us and because I know I can, I slip my arm through his.

He has a daughter now; a gorgeous little thing with huge green eyes and a birthmark on her hand. He shows me photos and his voice turns to treacle when he talks about her. And her mum? I venture but he shakes his head and we leave it at that.

These are the things I had forgotten:

• That he litters our conversations with my name
• That he has a scar slicing through his left eyebrow from where he came off his bike
• That we had made out more than once
• That we are exactly the same height

On our fourth lap, the sun starts to sink and I whip out my phone. Instagram, right? he asks and then laughs at me when I cock my eyebrow. Yup, found that too. I call him a stalker and he kisses the side of my forehead.

When it is time for me to head home, I close my eyes during his hug. He tells me we have to talk more and I nod but I think we both know that when it comes to us, it’s a bit more special when we haven’t spoken for a while; when the feelings have had time to settle like sand at the bottom of a pond; when he can phone me in the middle of the night and say awake? and I can grumble “I am now,” and talk for an hour anyway; when we can hide behind the distance and feel safe.

Scintilla 2013: Day 14 – Azure

I’m a cofounder of The Scintilla Project, along with two of my favourite people in life, Kim and Dominique. They are witty, wonderful and hot and I love them. We believe that your stories make you who you are and we’re asking you to share yours. Interested? Learn more at scintillaproject.com and find us on twitter @ScintillaHQ.

Today’s Scintilla prompt:

Behind the curtain to my left, there was a voice. It belonged to a lady who took great care in describing the extent of her pain, imploring first the nurses then the doctor when he was finally roused and brought to her side, that it was a 10. Don’t you understand? A 10. Do something.

The curtain itself was of an indiscriminate pattern. A swirl here. A loop there. Something that could have been a butterfly in the corner. I averted my eyes and counted the same block of ceiling tiles above my head 20 times before they came to talk to me. There were questions, the sort designed to ascertain whether or not I would need surgery: when did this start? Is there any pain? Has this happened before? But they were asked with a quiet compassion and, from what I could see in the gentle brown eyes of the nurse, sadness.

Later, when I was back in that bed beside the now sedated woman with the pain that was a 10, I placed my palms on the blanket that was the same pale blue as the floors and wondered out loud but without tears just why my body would turn on me this way. There’d been things in the past; nights spent in hospital beds while my Dad paced outside the door and my Mum squeezed my hands and sent up whispered prayers but those times were in the past. They were in the past and they had always been managed. Moreover, I’d always been given a precise explanation to help me understand the cause of my body’s rebellion.

This time I was to make do with sometimes these things just happen and for me, that wasn’t enough.

The timing was atrocious; we’d called it quits only two days beforehand and before beginning the process of “getting over it”, there were decisions to be made. Who to tell, what to say, what exactly my story should be to my work colleagues who saw me carted off in the back of an ambulance. I weighed them again while I recounted the ceiling tiles and twisted the pale blue blanket in my hands and above all else, didn’t cry.

After being released, there would be halting explanations over the phone and holes punched in walls and the decision not to bother anyone else with the weight of it. There would be times when I’d catch myself thinking what if and set myself firmly back on the path of it’s all for the best, I suppose.

But before that, before any of it, there was the bed and the feeling of utter helplessness, the emptiness and the question asked quietly over cracked lips of how I was to first mourn and then accept the loss of something that I hadn’t even known was there. There was the futility of trying to claw back control of my rebellious body and all the while, there was the sun hanging in an azure sky and shining through the window and onto my skin.

Scintilla 2013: Day Thirteen – First Mate

Brother, the victor of this tale beside me.

Today’s Scintilla prompt:

Post a photo of yourself from before age 10. Write about what you remember of the day in the photo.

I’d like you all to take note of the Jheri curl and the heinous owl glasses. I would also like you to take note of the way I am smiling. Despite my unfortunate appearance, I am smiling and I mean it. By the end of the day these photos were snapped, my smile could be found floating somewhere in the Irish Sea.

On my sister’s 16th birthday, Mama T gathered the three of us up and drove us to the terminal so that we could make the four hour ferry trip across the water to see Papa T. Ferry travel was not new to us; it was how we made our way back and forth from the mainland and with the vast restaurant, free kids cinema and miles of polished hallways to explore, it was always a joy. You see that smile? That is the smile of a gullible 8 year-old emetophobe who has never experienced choppy seas and thinks that only Tom & Jerry and mounds of ketchup-soaked chips await her.

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Scintilla 2013: Day Ten – Act II

I’m a cofounder of The Scintilla Project, along with two of my favourite people in life, Kim and Dominique. They are witty, wonderful and hot and I love them. We believe that your stories make you who you are and we’re asking you to share yours. Interested? Learn more at scintillaproject.com and find us on twitter @ScintillaHQ.

Answering the second of today’s pair of prompts from the Scintilla Project:

Given the chance again, I would have thumbed the last traces of blood from your lips and kissed you.

I would have slipped my hands inside your school blazer and made you drop your school bag and I would have left you standing on the sports field wondering where this girl, the one with the mischievous smile and the grazes on her knuckles had been all your life.

Because although I never told you, you were the stripe of yellow against the greyness of that particular year. And even though there were times when I could have sworn that everything I felt was blazing from my eyes and burning a path across the space between us, etching my devotion on your chest, superhero style, you never seemed to notice. Or at least if you did, it never tainted or tinged what we had.

I can count the reasons on my fingers of why I never went there: too shy, we’re platonic and that’s cool, bound to reject me but today the reasons that buttoned my lip seem ridiculous and were I gifted a do-over, I’d toss them over my shoulder for luck and lean in, eyes closed, lips parted, heart poised.

Maybe then, when you hooked your legs under mine during silent study and made my heart double back and stop, it would have meant something other than you wanting to get a closer look at the war wound on my knee and comment on the scar that it would leave. And perhaps, if you were lucky, I’d have traced your lips with the very tip of my tongue on the days we shunned the bus and chose to walk home instead. And, if everything went like it is supposed to when you summon the courage to kiss a boy with a too-long fringe, who broke the nose of a person that hurt you, I might not be the one that got away.

The same way that you are.