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Some place on the edge of town there is a river. It runs fast and strong. It kicks up fast off the pebbles and splits into a million tiny white droplets which hang, independent, for brief moments suspended in the sunlight, before falling back down to the join the rest.
Some place Marias sits on her fathers Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic High-Back, Multi-function Chair. He read an article in a Sunday newspaper magazine telling him how he, working in an office, is in the most danger from the wrong choice of chair. How you sit at a chair is this. Push your hips as far back as they can go in the chair. Put your feet flat on the floor and adjust the Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic Office Chair so that your knees are equal to, or slightly lower than, your hips. Adjust the back of the chair to a 100-110 reclining angle. Watch George check every five minutes that his knees are ever so slightly below his hips, and adjust, unsure just how low he is allowed to go without causing: back pain neck pain eye strain abdominal pain leg pain and repetitive motion injuries (RMIs). He’s sure he has an RMI or two, somewhere, growing insidiously.
The features of the Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic Office Chair are as following: distinctive ribbed upholstery, lumbar supportive contours, knee tilt control, pneumatic seat height adjustment, infinite tilt lock with tension adjustment and independent adjustments for back angle and back height, and height adjustable urethane arms.
George can hear the two work experience girls talking about the future. They sound so exited about it. That’s youth, he decides – the spirit hasn’t yet been crushed. The world seems spilling over with possibility. Over the summer the odd one, the one with braids in her hair and the slightly clumsy (slightly foreign? – the last syllable of some words are prolonged, she says yes instead of yeah) way of speaking, is going on an engineering foundation course. She sounds frustrated when she says “mohst of oureh physeecs class areah not evehn phaying attentian”. Must be foreign – doesn’t understand English kids. English kids want to hang around and smoke by bus shelters. Or, at least, that’s what they do. These girls – they sound so confident. They seem to know exactly what they want to do. She laughs, and it is real, and she looks forward to the end of work…but she still works hard. And she’s happy like that, he supposes. Because she must be, if she acts so happy.
A man called Martin walks over from the other side of the office with intent. George smiles to greet him. Martin suggests that they go to the pub for lunch. George agrees...
...Twitching around at night, little muscular reflexes kick and spasm his limbs, his face…every night George and his wife undress and take opposite sides of the bed whilst trying as hard as possible to avoid even eye contact. George cannot sleep until she does – he just lies there twitching and worrying, waiting. He’s terrified by the idea of her looking at him, watching him, without his knowing. It seemed unfair somehow. There was a reason that they married, though it had long seemed ridiculous to him: young and, they supposed (since all the evidence pointed in that direction) in love, it had seemed like the thing to do. He had never been sure about it – how to say no to someone on their knees proposing? – but the wave of everybody else’s enthusiasm carried him over his doubt.
The wedding was perfect, spring sun, his mother looking well (that is to say, less dying as usual), his bride looking like a stream of water, so clean you could wash in it and even drink it. For maybe 12 hours, from waking up in the morning and looking at his suit until he fell asleep with her wrapped around him, he felt happy. He thought this was how to live, and that this is what he should be doing. This was the end of depression, loneliness, loss of confidence, all his weakness and all his problems. Everything was going to be OK. He was in love, he decided – he must be, since he had married her after all – and wasn’t that supposed to heal everything?
Looking at her now, asleep, her back to him…she knew now what he had known back then. He had watched it become more and more apparent to her with a mixture of interest and horror. This was his doing: this was his weakness, again, but through her blindness she had stumbled into him and then into him, inside his very essense and he had welcomed her then sucked out all her girlish life and joy to make up for the void within himself where there was nothing but brutal reality, and left her a shell, an abandoned house, a worn out airplane left for scrap.
They had lived in this house for so long they had soaked into the walls. She had felt it first one spring afternoon toward the end of her girlhood, when she knew what was happening but did not want to admit it to her friends or herself. It was like a dust that could not be dusted, the thin layer of joy and optimism that had been carved off of her body so slowly she did not notice and sprinkled over the house, him digging in the knife with each meeting of their eyes, with each word that passed from him to her, each time he made love to her, and now it lay in the carpet and the walls, a permemant reminder of the defeat and disillusionment that life consists of.
Maria had lived in the dust all her life. She breathed it in the moment she was bought back from the hospital. She crwled in it and played in it. It was sucked into her infant lungs and into her bloodstream. As her mind developed it slowly built up a little shrine against the dust, a corner reserved for optimism and the propsect of a lasting and eternal happiness. She decorated it with films and books and lyrics and hid it away from the world, and now when she dances she dances within it, for it, and because of it.
Aside from this corner she was all contamination. At the bottom of it was a feeling opposite to what her dad had felt on his wedding day: any joy, any feeling that life was worth living and that there is a happy ending was choked and aphixiated, congealed and clotted until it lost its original shape, within minutes of it forming. She hid at first in her own fantasys and then in television – through television, by which I mean Home and Away, I mean Neighbors, I mean Saved By The Bell, she entered a world in which everything was ordered and there was no uncertainty: a person was a type, and conformed to that type unchangingly, never doubting, always being the same person from one day to the next, and the geeks stuck with the geeks and the sun was always shining and something was always happening and you knew where you were with people because a person was type and once you were friends with somebody you were always friends with them without any subtleties of jealousy, of using one another…and she held on until she could become old enough to be one of these people…she wanted to be a teenager, she wanted to go to High School.
But High School never came, Secondery School did. It wasn’t the same. The people were ugly and dressed in uniform. It smelt of egg and tuna sandwhices and it was always grey. Friendships were strange and confusing, and no matter how hard she tried she could never make reality fit the dream she had wished for. In time, at about 14, she caught a new version of the dream - the 90s idea of rock and roll – rock and roll thrown in with punk thrown in with grunge, which, though the ideology was never stated to her in a detailed manner, had some fairly clear principles: no to conformity, yes to cigerettes, yes to alcohol, yes to drugs. In this dream everything is ordered and everybody knows just what to do: you dye your hair if you’re a girl and grow it long if you’re a boy, you smoke weed and fight for its legalisation, you say fuhck Bush, and you say fuhck school, and you get fuhcked, and you fuhck.
So now she sits someplace on the edge of town with a cigerette and wonders: what the hell am I doing here? Because her hair has been a million colours and she’s dressed like a dirty angel, torn jeans and DIY T-shirt, and she’s smoked the right drug, she’s listened to the right music, she’s espouted the right views, she’s marched against a war and told everybody about it: and yet it is not as it is supposed to. Reality has refused to fit the dream, and now she starts to see the dreams for what they are. But slowly, painfully, reality dragging her away from them through lakes of broken glass as she clings to them with all her strength, as her mother was dragged away from her fantasy of love, kicking and screaming, refusing to accept reality until there really is no other choice.
Cut to Lizzie. Lizzie is kicking at the molehills in her mind. Last night had been a bad one: no matter how many times she convinces herself...
That's where I left it. Ta for reading if you have. It's not properly edited yet, so I would very much like any stupid bits, any cheesy bits, etc pointed out and laughed at.
Some place Marias sits on her fathers Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic High-Back, Multi-function Chair. He read an article in a Sunday newspaper magazine telling him how he, working in an office, is in the most danger from the wrong choice of chair. How you sit at a chair is this. Push your hips as far back as they can go in the chair. Put your feet flat on the floor and adjust the Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic Office Chair so that your knees are equal to, or slightly lower than, your hips. Adjust the back of the chair to a 100-110 reclining angle. Watch George check every five minutes that his knees are ever so slightly below his hips, and adjust, unsure just how low he is allowed to go without causing: back pain neck pain eye strain abdominal pain leg pain and repetitive motion injuries (RMIs). He’s sure he has an RMI or two, somewhere, growing insidiously.
The features of the Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic Office Chair are as following: distinctive ribbed upholstery, lumbar supportive contours, knee tilt control, pneumatic seat height adjustment, infinite tilt lock with tension adjustment and independent adjustments for back angle and back height, and height adjustable urethane arms.
George can hear the two work experience girls talking about the future. They sound so exited about it. That’s youth, he decides – the spirit hasn’t yet been crushed. The world seems spilling over with possibility. Over the summer the odd one, the one with braids in her hair and the slightly clumsy (slightly foreign? – the last syllable of some words are prolonged, she says yes instead of yeah) way of speaking, is going on an engineering foundation course. She sounds frustrated when she says “mohst of oureh physeecs class areah not evehn phaying attentian”. Must be foreign – doesn’t understand English kids. English kids want to hang around and smoke by bus shelters. Or, at least, that’s what they do. These girls – they sound so confident. They seem to know exactly what they want to do. She laughs, and it is real, and she looks forward to the end of work…but she still works hard. And she’s happy like that, he supposes. Because she must be, if she acts so happy.
A man called Martin walks over from the other side of the office with intent. George smiles to greet him. Martin suggests that they go to the pub for lunch. George agrees...
...Twitching around at night, little muscular reflexes kick and spasm his limbs, his face…every night George and his wife undress and take opposite sides of the bed whilst trying as hard as possible to avoid even eye contact. George cannot sleep until she does – he just lies there twitching and worrying, waiting. He’s terrified by the idea of her looking at him, watching him, without his knowing. It seemed unfair somehow. There was a reason that they married, though it had long seemed ridiculous to him: young and, they supposed (since all the evidence pointed in that direction) in love, it had seemed like the thing to do. He had never been sure about it – how to say no to someone on their knees proposing? – but the wave of everybody else’s enthusiasm carried him over his doubt.
The wedding was perfect, spring sun, his mother looking well (that is to say, less dying as usual), his bride looking like a stream of water, so clean you could wash in it and even drink it. For maybe 12 hours, from waking up in the morning and looking at his suit until he fell asleep with her wrapped around him, he felt happy. He thought this was how to live, and that this is what he should be doing. This was the end of depression, loneliness, loss of confidence, all his weakness and all his problems. Everything was going to be OK. He was in love, he decided – he must be, since he had married her after all – and wasn’t that supposed to heal everything?
Looking at her now, asleep, her back to him…she knew now what he had known back then. He had watched it become more and more apparent to her with a mixture of interest and horror. This was his doing: this was his weakness, again, but through her blindness she had stumbled into him and then into him, inside his very essense and he had welcomed her then sucked out all her girlish life and joy to make up for the void within himself where there was nothing but brutal reality, and left her a shell, an abandoned house, a worn out airplane left for scrap.
They had lived in this house for so long they had soaked into the walls. She had felt it first one spring afternoon toward the end of her girlhood, when she knew what was happening but did not want to admit it to her friends or herself. It was like a dust that could not be dusted, the thin layer of joy and optimism that had been carved off of her body so slowly she did not notice and sprinkled over the house, him digging in the knife with each meeting of their eyes, with each word that passed from him to her, each time he made love to her, and now it lay in the carpet and the walls, a permemant reminder of the defeat and disillusionment that life consists of.
Maria had lived in the dust all her life. She breathed it in the moment she was bought back from the hospital. She crwled in it and played in it. It was sucked into her infant lungs and into her bloodstream. As her mind developed it slowly built up a little shrine against the dust, a corner reserved for optimism and the propsect of a lasting and eternal happiness. She decorated it with films and books and lyrics and hid it away from the world, and now when she dances she dances within it, for it, and because of it.
Aside from this corner she was all contamination. At the bottom of it was a feeling opposite to what her dad had felt on his wedding day: any joy, any feeling that life was worth living and that there is a happy ending was choked and aphixiated, congealed and clotted until it lost its original shape, within minutes of it forming. She hid at first in her own fantasys and then in television – through television, by which I mean Home and Away, I mean Neighbors, I mean Saved By The Bell, she entered a world in which everything was ordered and there was no uncertainty: a person was a type, and conformed to that type unchangingly, never doubting, always being the same person from one day to the next, and the geeks stuck with the geeks and the sun was always shining and something was always happening and you knew where you were with people because a person was type and once you were friends with somebody you were always friends with them without any subtleties of jealousy, of using one another…and she held on until she could become old enough to be one of these people…she wanted to be a teenager, she wanted to go to High School.
But High School never came, Secondery School did. It wasn’t the same. The people were ugly and dressed in uniform. It smelt of egg and tuna sandwhices and it was always grey. Friendships were strange and confusing, and no matter how hard she tried she could never make reality fit the dream she had wished for. In time, at about 14, she caught a new version of the dream - the 90s idea of rock and roll – rock and roll thrown in with punk thrown in with grunge, which, though the ideology was never stated to her in a detailed manner, had some fairly clear principles: no to conformity, yes to cigerettes, yes to alcohol, yes to drugs. In this dream everything is ordered and everybody knows just what to do: you dye your hair if you’re a girl and grow it long if you’re a boy, you smoke weed and fight for its legalisation, you say fuhck Bush, and you say fuhck school, and you get fuhcked, and you fuhck.
So now she sits someplace on the edge of town with a cigerette and wonders: what the hell am I doing here? Because her hair has been a million colours and she’s dressed like a dirty angel, torn jeans and DIY T-shirt, and she’s smoked the right drug, she’s listened to the right music, she’s espouted the right views, she’s marched against a war and told everybody about it: and yet it is not as it is supposed to. Reality has refused to fit the dream, and now she starts to see the dreams for what they are. But slowly, painfully, reality dragging her away from them through lakes of broken glass as she clings to them with all her strength, as her mother was dragged away from her fantasy of love, kicking and screaming, refusing to accept reality until there really is no other choice.
Cut to Lizzie. Lizzie is kicking at the molehills in her mind. Last night had been a bad one: no matter how many times she convinces herself...
That's where I left it. Ta for reading if you have. It's not properly edited yet, so I would very much like any stupid bits, any cheesy bits, etc pointed out and laughed at.
Quite detailed, needs a bit of spelling editing but well thought out and written. Keep it up.
Some place on the edge of town there is a river. It runs fast and strong. It kicks up fast off the pebbles and splits into a million tiny white droplets which hang, independent, for brief moments suspended in the sunlight, before falling back down to the join the rest.
Some place Marias sits on her fathers Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic High-Back, Multi-function Chair. He read an article in a Sunday newspaper magazine telling him how he, working in an office, is in the most danger from the wrong choice of chair. How you sit at a chair is this. Push your hips as far back as they can go in the chair. Put your feet flat on the floor and adjust the Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic Office Chair so that your knees are equal to, or slightly lower than, your hips. Adjust the back of the chair to a 100-110 reclining angle. Watch George check every five minutes that his knees are ever so slightly below his hips, and adjust, unsure just how low he is allowed to go without causing: back pain neck pain eye strain abdominal pain leg pain and repetitive motion injuries (RMIs). He’s sure he has an RMI or two, somewhere, growing insidiously.
The features of the Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic Office Chair are as following: distinctive ribbed upholstery, lumbar supportive contours, knee tilt control, pneumatic seat height adjustment, infinite tilt lock with tension adjustment and independent adjustments for back angle and back height, and height adjustable urethane arms.
George can hear the two work experience girls talking about the future. They sound so exited about it. That’s youth, he decides – the spirit hasn’t yet been crushed. The world seems spilling over with possibility. Over the summer the odd one, the one with braids in her hair and the slightly clumsy (slightly foreign? – the last syllable of some words are prolonged, she says yes instead of yeah) way of speaking, is going on an engineering foundation course. She sounds frustrated when she says “mohst of oureh physeecs class areah not evehn phaying attentian”. Must be foreign – doesn’t understand English kids. English kids want to hang around and smoke by bus shelters. Or, at least, that’s what they do. These girls – they sound so confident. They seem to know exactly what they want to do. She laughs, and it is real, and she looks forward to the end of work…but she still works hard. And she’s happy like that, he supposes. Because she must be, if she acts so happy.
A man called Martin walks over from the other side of the office with intent. George smiles to greet him. Martin suggests that they go to the pub for lunch. George agrees...
...Twitching around at night, little muscular reflexes kick and spasm his limbs, his face…every night George and his wife undress and take opposite sides of the bed whilst trying as hard as possible to avoid even eye contact. George cannot sleep until she does – he just lies there twitching and worrying, waiting. He’s terrified by the idea of her looking at him, watching him, without his knowing. It seemed unfair somehow. There was a reason that they married, though it had long seemed ridiculous to him: young and, they supposed (since all the evidence pointed in that direction) in love, it had seemed like the thing to do. He had never been sure about it – how to say no to someone on their knees proposing? – but the wave of everybody else’s enthusiasm carried him over his doubt.
The wedding was perfect, spring sun, his mother looking well (that is to say, less dying as usual), his bride looking like a stream of water, so clean you could wash in it and even drink it. For maybe 12 hours, from waking up in the morning and looking at his suit until he fell asleep with her wrapped around him, he felt happy. He thought this was how to live, and that this is what he should be doing. This was the end of depression, loneliness, loss of confidence, all his weakness and all his problems. Everything was going to be OK. He was in love, he decided – he must be, since he had married her after all – and wasn’t that supposed to heal everything?
Looking at her now, asleep, her back to him…she knew now what he had known back then. He had watched it become more and more apparent to her with a mixture of interest and horror. This was his doing: this was his weakness, again, but through her blindness she had stumbled into him and then into him, inside his very essense and he had welcomed her then sucked out all her girlish life and joy to make up for the void within himself where there was nothing but brutal reality, and left her a shell, an abandoned house, a worn out airplane left for scrap.
They had lived in this house for so long they had soaked into the walls. She had felt it first one spring afternoon toward the end of her girlhood, when she knew what was happening but did not want to admit it to her friends or herself. It was like a dust that could not be dusted, the thin layer of joy and optimism that had been carved off of her body so slowly she did not notice and sprinkled over the house, him digging in the knife with each meeting of their eyes, with each word that passed from him to her, each time he made love to her, and now it lay in the carpet and the walls, a permemant reminder of the defeat and disillusionment that life consists of.
Maria had lived in the dust all her life. She breathed it in the moment she was bought back from the hospital. She crwled in it and played in it. It was sucked into her infant lungs and into her bloodstream. As her mind developed it slowly built up a little shrine against the dust, a corner reserved for optimism and the propsect of a lasting and eternal happiness. She decorated it with films and books and lyrics and hid it away from the world, and now when she dances she dances within it, for it, and because of it.
Aside from this corner she was all contamination. At the bottom of it was a feeling opposite to what her dad had felt on his wedding day: any joy, any feeling that life was worth living and that there is a happy ending was choked and aphixiated, congealed and clotted until it lost its original shape, within minutes of it forming. She hid at first in her own fantasys and then in television – through television, by which I mean Home and Away, I mean Neighbors, I mean Saved By The Bell, she entered a world in which everything was ordered and there was no uncertainty: a person was a type, and conformed to that type unchangingly, never doubting, always being the same person from one day to the next, and the geeks stuck with the geeks and the sun was always shining and something was always happening and you knew where you were with people because a person was type and once you were friends with somebody you were always friends with them without any subtleties of jealousy, of using one another…and she held on until she could become old enough to be one of these people…she wanted to be a teenager, she wanted to go to High School.
But High School never came, Secondery School did. It wasn’t the same. The people were ugly and dressed in uniform. It smelt of egg and tuna sandwhices and it was always grey. Friendships were strange and confusing, and no matter how hard she tried she could never make reality fit the dream she had wished for. In time, at about 14, she caught a new version of the dream - the 90s idea of rock and roll – rock and roll thrown in with punk thrown in with grunge, which, though the ideology was never stated to her in a detailed manner, had some fairly clear principles: no to conformity, yes to cigerettes, yes to alcohol, yes to drugs. In this dream everything is ordered and everybody knows just what to do: you dye your hair if you’re a girl and grow it long if you’re a boy, you smoke weed and fight for its legalisation, you say fuhck Bush, and you say fuhck school, and you get fuhcked, and you fuhck.
So now she sits someplace on the edge of town with a cigerette and wonders: what the hell am I doing here? Because her hair has been a million colours and she’s dressed like a dirty angel, torn jeans and DIY T-shirt, and she’s smoked the right drug, she’s listened to the right music, she’s espouted the right views, she’s marched against a war and told everybody about it: and yet it is not as it is supposed to. Reality has refused to fit the dream, and now she starts to see the dreams for what they are. But slowly, painfully, reality dragging her away from them through lakes of broken glass as she clings to them with all her strength, as her mother was dragged away from her fantasy of love, kicking and screaming, refusing to accept reality until there really is no other choice.
Cut to Lizzie. Lizzie is kicking at the molehills in her mind. Last night had been a bad one: no matter how many times she convinces herself...
That's where I left it. Ta for reading if you have. It's not properly edited yet, so I would very much like any stupid bits, any cheesy bits, etc pointed out and laughed at.
Some place Marias sits on her fathers Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic High-Back, Multi-function Chair. He read an article in a Sunday newspaper magazine telling him how he, working in an office, is in the most danger from the wrong choice of chair. How you sit at a chair is this. Push your hips as far back as they can go in the chair. Put your feet flat on the floor and adjust the Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic Office Chair so that your knees are equal to, or slightly lower than, your hips. Adjust the back of the chair to a 100-110 reclining angle. Watch George check every five minutes that his knees are ever so slightly below his hips, and adjust, unsure just how low he is allowed to go without causing: back pain neck pain eye strain abdominal pain leg pain and repetitive motion injuries (RMIs). He’s sure he has an RMI or two, somewhere, growing insidiously.
The features of the Global TechPosture II Executive Ergonomic Office Chair are as following: distinctive ribbed upholstery, lumbar supportive contours, knee tilt control, pneumatic seat height adjustment, infinite tilt lock with tension adjustment and independent adjustments for back angle and back height, and height adjustable urethane arms.
George can hear the two work experience girls talking about the future. They sound so exited about it. That’s youth, he decides – the spirit hasn’t yet been crushed. The world seems spilling over with possibility. Over the summer the odd one, the one with braids in her hair and the slightly clumsy (slightly foreign? – the last syllable of some words are prolonged, she says yes instead of yeah) way of speaking, is going on an engineering foundation course. She sounds frustrated when she says “mohst of oureh physeecs class areah not evehn phaying attentian”. Must be foreign – doesn’t understand English kids. English kids want to hang around and smoke by bus shelters. Or, at least, that’s what they do. These girls – they sound so confident. They seem to know exactly what they want to do. She laughs, and it is real, and she looks forward to the end of work…but she still works hard. And she’s happy like that, he supposes. Because she must be, if she acts so happy.
A man called Martin walks over from the other side of the office with intent. George smiles to greet him. Martin suggests that they go to the pub for lunch. George agrees...
...Twitching around at night, little muscular reflexes kick and spasm his limbs, his face…every night George and his wife undress and take opposite sides of the bed whilst trying as hard as possible to avoid even eye contact. George cannot sleep until she does – he just lies there twitching and worrying, waiting. He’s terrified by the idea of her looking at him, watching him, without his knowing. It seemed unfair somehow. There was a reason that they married, though it had long seemed ridiculous to him: young and, they supposed (since all the evidence pointed in that direction) in love, it had seemed like the thing to do. He had never been sure about it – how to say no to someone on their knees proposing? – but the wave of everybody else’s enthusiasm carried him over his doubt.
The wedding was perfect, spring sun, his mother looking well (that is to say, less dying as usual), his bride looking like a stream of water, so clean you could wash in it and even drink it. For maybe 12 hours, from waking up in the morning and looking at his suit until he fell asleep with her wrapped around him, he felt happy. He thought this was how to live, and that this is what he should be doing. This was the end of depression, loneliness, loss of confidence, all his weakness and all his problems. Everything was going to be OK. He was in love, he decided – he must be, since he had married her after all – and wasn’t that supposed to heal everything?
Looking at her now, asleep, her back to him…she knew now what he had known back then. He had watched it become more and more apparent to her with a mixture of interest and horror. This was his doing: this was his weakness, again, but through her blindness she had stumbled into him and then into him, inside his very essense and he had welcomed her then sucked out all her girlish life and joy to make up for the void within himself where there was nothing but brutal reality, and left her a shell, an abandoned house, a worn out airplane left for scrap.
They had lived in this house for so long they had soaked into the walls. She had felt it first one spring afternoon toward the end of her girlhood, when she knew what was happening but did not want to admit it to her friends or herself. It was like a dust that could not be dusted, the thin layer of joy and optimism that had been carved off of her body so slowly she did not notice and sprinkled over the house, him digging in the knife with each meeting of their eyes, with each word that passed from him to her, each time he made love to her, and now it lay in the carpet and the walls, a permemant reminder of the defeat and disillusionment that life consists of.
Maria had lived in the dust all her life. She breathed it in the moment she was bought back from the hospital. She crwled in it and played in it. It was sucked into her infant lungs and into her bloodstream. As her mind developed it slowly built up a little shrine against the dust, a corner reserved for optimism and the propsect of a lasting and eternal happiness. She decorated it with films and books and lyrics and hid it away from the world, and now when she dances she dances within it, for it, and because of it.
Aside from this corner she was all contamination. At the bottom of it was a feeling opposite to what her dad had felt on his wedding day: any joy, any feeling that life was worth living and that there is a happy ending was choked and aphixiated, congealed and clotted until it lost its original shape, within minutes of it forming. She hid at first in her own fantasys and then in television – through television, by which I mean Home and Away, I mean Neighbors, I mean Saved By The Bell, she entered a world in which everything was ordered and there was no uncertainty: a person was a type, and conformed to that type unchangingly, never doubting, always being the same person from one day to the next, and the geeks stuck with the geeks and the sun was always shining and something was always happening and you knew where you were with people because a person was type and once you were friends with somebody you were always friends with them without any subtleties of jealousy, of using one another…and she held on until she could become old enough to be one of these people…she wanted to be a teenager, she wanted to go to High School.
But High School never came, Secondery School did. It wasn’t the same. The people were ugly and dressed in uniform. It smelt of egg and tuna sandwhices and it was always grey. Friendships were strange and confusing, and no matter how hard she tried she could never make reality fit the dream she had wished for. In time, at about 14, she caught a new version of the dream - the 90s idea of rock and roll – rock and roll thrown in with punk thrown in with grunge, which, though the ideology was never stated to her in a detailed manner, had some fairly clear principles: no to conformity, yes to cigerettes, yes to alcohol, yes to drugs. In this dream everything is ordered and everybody knows just what to do: you dye your hair if you’re a girl and grow it long if you’re a boy, you smoke weed and fight for its legalisation, you say fuhck Bush, and you say fuhck school, and you get fuhcked, and you fuhck.
So now she sits someplace on the edge of town with a cigerette and wonders: what the hell am I doing here? Because her hair has been a million colours and she’s dressed like a dirty angel, torn jeans and DIY T-shirt, and she’s smoked the right drug, she’s listened to the right music, she’s espouted the right views, she’s marched against a war and told everybody about it: and yet it is not as it is supposed to. Reality has refused to fit the dream, and now she starts to see the dreams for what they are. But slowly, painfully, reality dragging her away from them through lakes of broken glass as she clings to them with all her strength, as her mother was dragged away from her fantasy of love, kicking and screaming, refusing to accept reality until there really is no other choice.
Cut to Lizzie. Lizzie is kicking at the molehills in her mind. Last night had been a bad one: no matter how many times she convinces herself...
That's where I left it. Ta for reading if you have. It's not properly edited yet, so I would very much like any stupid bits, any cheesy bits, etc pointed out and laughed at.