Tag: memories

Posted in Blog, Creative Writing, Writing

Feliz Cumpleaños, Ol’ Brown Eyes

Posted on by MissJSquared

I stand above her cot,
catching her eye as fading stars catch the first morning rays.
She is so small,
so minuscule that it is hard to believe she will be any bigger,
but she blooms,
and behind the cot,
by the window,
there she is again.

Precocious brat in a princess dress,
smiling, like she still believes it’s all up to her,
and seated on the window sill,
waving away the wafting smoke from a secret cigarette,
there she is again.
She doesn’t smile at that age,
but she still believes in something,
staring up at the vanishing night’s sky,
choking on the tobacco and all of her secrets.

I turn back to the infant,
pure as driven snow,
at ease with how out of control everything is.
She just stares up,
curious, calm eyes,
the kind of cool, docile gaze that will never rest in my eyes again.

There is one more,
so similar,
so recent,
peeking out from behind the curtains,
trying not to disturb the room around her,
hoping to go unnoticed,
because she’s got the idea that she’s gone to waste,
so now she’s self conscious.
That’s just like her.
I don’t know where she gets that from.

One by one,
the brat,
the moody teen,
the hopeful newborn,
and last year’s girl are all around me,
surrounding me with a hopeful glance.
I am this year’s model,
and I don’t know how I’ll change before I return,
but it did me so much good to see all the girls I’ve been,
and to tell each of them that they’ve been wonderful.

I just wish I could have told them before now.

Posted in Blog, Creative Writing, Writing

Coping Mechanisms For When I Remember That You Are No Longer Mine

Posted on by MissJSquared

It’s only over,
that’s all.
Memories exist,
but taste oh so bland.

It’s only over,
you know.
I’ll remember you,
like I remember Hastings beach on a sunny day,
when I dug myself into the sand with a sullen, tear soaked face and begged to stay.

It’s only over,
I guess.
I have nothing to cry about but everything.
I write your name in the margins of my notebooks when my mind is absent,
ruining my best pen with furious, frustrated scribbles to cover it when my mind returns,
but I’m not thinking about it too deeply.

It’s only over,
I say.
It’s not the end of the world.
I’ll never see the end of the world.
The Earth does not shatter or explode when I remember,
but a small knot is tied inside my stomach,
and I recall that day on the beach,
just a child who didn’t understand that happy days only contain the same twenty four hours as sad ones.

Posted in Blog, Creative Writing, Writing

Summergirl

Posted on by MissJSquared

There was this record,
that you hated and wouldn’t hear,
no matter how hard I haggled and all the battles I fought to make you see that it was our lives in a neat, sixteen track package.
I spent the last few weeks of the summer shaking and salivating,
possessed with the feeling of finally being understood,
by some distant pop “demon” (as my father found it fit to call her),
and I just wanted to show you,
that we weren’t alone.

You wouldn’t be told,
and we sat in the hallway in silence,
watching illegally downloaded American TV shows,
so that we would be too distracted to actually talk to each other.
I was beginning to think it was about more than the record,
but you wouldn’t be told,
putting your hands, your glares and other things across my lips to keep me quiet.

You know,
Dogs can play poker,
and sure, it’s intense,
but it makes a little more sense when you confess that sometimes,
two teenage girls play poker,
alone and without an audience,
maybe not even a full game
without any real idea of what they’re doing.
It’s never actually been a crime (for girls),
and maybe it’s good,
like that record was good,
and like we could be good, if we could just…

Late summer love always feels a little misguided when term begins again.
Sweet sixteen,
out of school uniform and out of my mind as the last of the September sun glistens and kisses my freckles,
the way you like to do,
until someone finds our secret hideaway,
and we make up a lie that nobody believes,
and I listen to that record again,
wishing that my life was an electro pop banger.

I was your chronic Candy Warhol,
curious about the butterflies that lined my stomach when we shared alcopops in an Irish bar we snuck in to.
I was stuck on you,
no matter how many times my playboy mouth said different.
You said so too, sometimes,
when you’d had too many Smirnoff Ices and had decided to be beautifully blunt.
Your fleeting kiss was ice cream, topped with honey.

Posted in Blog, Creative Writing, Writing

Her Father Is Dead and Today Is His Birthday

Posted on by MissJSquared

I send best wishes to your ashes,
flowers with bowed heads are no comfort,
because I feel nothing on this day, every year.
There is happiness in the days before,
then hangovers,
then nothing.
An emptiness that is taller than you and I,
an endless echo of silence that stalks me from midnight, until the twenty ninth stutters into life,
and it’s not like I haven’t tried to find something else to think about,
to see if the shadows would leave me in peace.
I just never could.

Posted in Blog, Creative Writing, Writing

Because?

Posted on by MissJSquared

Why can’t you see what you’ve already seen in yourself?
Why are the same patterns painted differently in your eyes,
when they look just the same to mine?
I can see how we both took the same path,
and I want answers and something to soothe me,
but it never comes.

You were at the end of a road,
watching me wander down it with wide eyes and a teddy bear clasped in my hands but you wouldn’t walk back down it,
you wouldn’t move from your spot to try and stop me going somewhere where nobody returns, and nobody is the same afterwards.
You let me change,
you saw it happen and you let things go the same,
you let me blame myself,
you let me surrender to shame and follow the same road you went down.

You saw my little legs making big steps,
and you closed your eyes.
You recognised how your own pain presented and you closed your eyes when mine started to mimic it,
because…
Because?

I just want to know why we met eye to eye and walked the same path,
decades apart but you didn’t notice.
I want to know how the same monsters made their way towards me,
and you didn’t notice,
until they’d torn me apart.