Copied and edited from WhatsApp to blogspot, Thurs 11th May 2023
Say there are two children in a story. One of them is, say, five or six?
Which means that one is one or two.
But the mother can't stop the children from seeing the grandma.
Years go by, and the only apology the older sister receives is meant for her little sister.
The older sister forgets. She forgets hard, and in her future wonders, why can't I remember? What hurt me so badly that I can't even think?
And she would never dream of making the little sister remember, so she carries it alone, mostly with just the echoes of what happens when you love too much. And what you will receive from those who are supposed to love you.
There we are! A short story. Hahaha.
(And I wonder why I flinch at tiny things 🤣 I do make myself laugh a lot.)
... ... ...
Oh... an epilogue... the older sister visits a clairvoyant. She receives an apology from beyond. From the man she's looked up to the most. He promises to plant roots for her, that she is on the right track. He apologises. To her father.
She goes away and climbs into a box it'll take her a year to escape.
She outgrows the box. She didn't even realise she'd tripped into it. The box felt comfy at first but has been slowly constricting ever since she tripped, until one day she cannot breathe and she wonders why?
For lack of breath, there is no energy to get out. So constricted is she, that she cannot pull back to punch outwards. So she briefly gives up. And accepts her place in the box.
The box hurts but the box is easy. She can clean the box from here. For everyone.
Just telling in third person so no one gets uncomfortable. I'm afraid of scaring people with heavy disclosures. Haha.
True story, but a chapter that is often lost to me.
But the box isn't just killing her, it has begun to squeeze the life out of what she has given life to. Her only son.
Seeing this, the older sister, now a mother, expands somehow. The expansion she has been feeding within herself her whole life begins to finally grow from the seeds she has planted.
She can tolerate extreme pain. As long as the pain is aimed at her, she will bear it to protect all others at all costs.
She doesn't want anyone in the world to feel the pain she has felt. The pain of arriving in a world where there is no love left between parents. The pain of loving someone who will cause you harm when you are too young to understand that's not how it should be. The pain of wanting desperately to escape, but not having the means to do so.
The seeds were sewn early, she planted them as an extreme act of self protection. "If I can plant these seeds now, maybe one day they will help me grow away from the pain I was born into."
The seeds look like flippancy to her teachers and peers.
The seeds cause misunderstanding.
And because the seeds are deep within her, she loses sight of why they were planted and what they are there for.
She cannot make sense of herself, she cannot explain herself.
In her real life, she becomes quiet.
She caves inwards.
Her only outward breath is a performance. Despite her fears, she will climb onto stages of all kinds and dance and sing so that she may breath out for a moment.
And she learns to find solace in breathing out.
If she breathes out hard enough, people will stop misunderstanding, surely. They'll stop asking what the seeds are and not being satisfied with her half-interpreted answers.
If she can explain herself through other people's words, surely she'll learn what her own story was.
Time goes on and she forgets and forgets and has forgotten by the time her own baby comes.
Unlike her, this baby was created in pain. Created in pain, arriving into pain held off by the now mother who bears the pain now for two.
She will hold the pain back from the baby for as long as she is able. He will feel only love, acceptance and understanding for as long as she can carry the weight she wants so desperately to keep away from his back.
But she is only one person.
Where babies need two parents, a village, a community, this baby's mother is entirely alone.
She has breathed out so hard that she is turning inside out.
Everyone can see parts of her that she can't explain.
Her insides have fallen out onto the floor and all she can do is attempt to get clean and watch in horror as her inner most parts are cleaned up off the floor and the baby is cared for in the correct way by others.
The baby's father loses interest quickly.
He stays for a minute out of duty and the leaves to drink and drink and will only come home to stare at the baby and posses the baby and bully the mother.
She will bear it all for the baby.
And then one night or day or whatever it was, she leaves the father.
He has stared one too many times.
He has held the baby too tight with paint-stripper breath one too many times.
He has pointed at her and called her names she will bear, but begrudgingly, one too many times.
And this is her first true expansion in her adult life.
Z: "(I don't mind carrying on later if this is getting boring on the other end 🤣🤣🤣)"
Part II
Z: "Alright ❤️
Are you sitting comfortably?
(Or something like it with 2 kiddies 🙈❤️🌻)
I suppose a reader can pick up a book whenever they like, so I shall begin again..."
The daughter, older sister, mother who sees herself in so many books and Puppet shows and circuses, but cannot see herself in the mirror, knows she has to go.
Somehow, the seeds have rooted just enough, and the vines of the plant have expanded *just* enough for her to know what to do.
She leaves with nothing. And leaves with everything.
She has her baby, now a year old, and she is running home. Where home doesn't exist any more.
She runs and runs and runs and outwardly reaches her last place of residence before leaving, but she finds that there is no home there at all.
She is entirely lost, now.
She is running home as hard as she can, but the home she needs has evaporated.
It evaporated in the middle of the night just before the turn of the millennium.
All that remains are fragments of relics on display in the new museums of her history, guarded by stewards that she didn't choose.
Her story is forgotten and forgotten and forgotten again, and she understands why less and less and begins to resign herself to her having forgotten.
She believes anyone who tells her not to go looking. Why go looking for such hurtful things? Leave it on the shelf. Keep building the walls. You'll be taken more seriously that way. Explain academically, people will understand. Make them laugh so they'll accept you. You can veil how you feel in a joke and people might laugh.
They'll laugh at you more often than with you, but still, they're laughing. And when this is all you have to cling onto, you'll hold onto it for dear life.
And they laugh.
They laugh at her failures, her efforts, her ways and means of doing things, the way she dresses.
She is written off as mentally ill, unstable, desperate, needy, in need, poverty stricken.
When in fact, the only defeceit damaging her from the inside, strangling the vines of the plant she forgets is there, is a defeceit of love.
There is no love.
There are things that look like love, veiling hard people, harsh words, transactional spirits.
It looks like love when people hurt her.
She has learned to expect pain when you show love.
So she allows it. Over and over and over again. And she lives like this for ten years.
And here we find her in her box, being constricted and squashed and her baby now struggling to breathe too.
She has had enough.
She tentatively breathes in.
She calls her old friends.
She apologises for things that aren't even her fault. She apologises for pushing them away where she has in fact been isolated. The world has squeezed her into this tiny space and from there she has no other option than to breathe in just enough to be able to ask for help.
Breathing in does help.
In creates out and on the out breath, again, she can show strength.
Whether it is there or not, she can display strength, make herself bigger and bigger and too big all over again and throw her weight and stand in her power and scream "enough."
(She is a red fucking panda hahahaha.)
She stomps and shouts, but not outwardly. Outwardly she is calm and measured. There is a difference this time.
There is a protective force at work that she has never encountered before.
She stares into the mirror and she sees herself, but she can't work out where the force has come from.
She has been searching for home all her life but she can't quite see it when it arrives.
She doesn't yet realise that home is gone. It has crumbled and burned. She needs to tend to what is still there.
Her garden.
Z: "(Wheeeeyyyyy 😅🙈🤙🏻🤣 Not that garden. Although...)"
She doesn't need the home that's crumbled and burned. She needs a gardener.
"Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
A story she heard and tells and retells not quite knowing why she is telling it, not knowing what she is looking for, not remembering or even half remembering now that there is a whole garden within her that she planted so early on.
In a computer age, she is used to accidental Happenings. She is used to the "bumping into" of a future colleague or mentor.
What she doesn't expect
is to find a colleague
a mentor
and a gardener.
All rolled into one.
She doesn't realise what he is at first, but the garden hasn't forgotten. The garden recognises it's gardener.
The seeds she planted, that took root, weathered winters and droughts, knows what it is looking for.
In her cerebral brain, she recognises the face in the little picture.
She has no idea why.
She works in the same fields as the gardener.
They slave away at the same causes.
Maybe they have crossed paths? She wonders.
She cannot resist. The garden is stronger than she thought, the roots too deep. They reach into the ground now, and draw from the earth beneath her, and give her the strength to reach out...
("This is a beautiful tale ❤️❤️" says The Gardener...)
She says...
INSTA PIC 9 FEB TBA
And he replies...
INSTA PIC 9 FEB TBA
And the memories don't stop coming...
They don't stop flowing...
And she has no idea how or why he can do this, but he begins to draw out of her the things she thought she had forgotten.
Where she has taken a breath in, he gets to work and cares for the garden immediately. He, like her, is used to pain and seeing pain and bearing pain and knows a garden that needs tending to when he sees it.
He is not afraid of hard work. He has already done it.
He has worked so so hard that the daughter, sister, mother, weathered garden doesn't scare him very much.
It's prickly and wild and overgrown, but he's seen this before.
He knows that an "ugly" garden just needs love.
So he knocks at the gate.
She is terrified.
She has learned what happens when you let people in.
She has learned the cost of trusting shiesters and con-artists.
There are great stumps of cut away foliage and they are rotting away.
She has paid and paid and paid for the help she has begrudgingly asked for, so why is this gardener so different?
But the garden knows better, and says "come in."
She watches.
The garden isn't as ugly as she remembers. And the gardener is gentle.
He looks around.
She looks at him looking around.
The garden is pleased.
And somehow, the woman trapped in the box feels more expansion still.
As she watches him sit in the garden, careful but unafraid, she wonders... where has my gardener been?
Why has it taken me so long? Him so long? This so long? Us so long?
And she realises...
A gardener is a gardener. The love to love the plants. A weed is just a beautiful plant in a place that is not meant for it. The plants within her garden need repotting.
He begins.
She understands.
Every day, her reflection becomes clearer, and not only that, but there is a beautiful pond in the garden, full of life.
It is a deep pond, and anyone nearby must be careful not to fall in, she worries, but the gardener is unphased and carries on his work.
She breaks out of the box.
She realised that it didn't even hurt, she simply had to climb out.
She lifts her baby from the box too.
And she carries him, holding him tight, into the garden.
The garden is suddenly beautiful to her.
It is the same garden that was always there, but the plants are being repotted, she doesn't understand the design yet, but she sees everything moving to a better place.
The gardener is happy to garden. He has been gardening souls all his life.
She is scared again.
She wonders how she can repay him
She is desperate to settle her debts, she doesn't understand what to do...
She has learned that love hurts and this is how we pay, but she can't find the hurt here.
She doesn't understand how the garden is now so peaceful.
But the garden understands.
The gardener, realising she has joined him, looks up from what he is doing and stands to greet her.
He holds her for a moment, and in doing so, her baby too.
She can feel years of weeds and thorns and torn away fruits being swept away.
Still, she doesn't understand, but still the garden knows.
The gardener takes her hand gently, and she takes the hand of her baby, now boy, and he leads her to the pond.
She looks into the pond.
They all look together.
And suddenly she is met with everything.
She sees herself and she sees the gardener and she sees her son. Their lives playing out in the pond, all dancing around each other.
She can see more children playing in the pond.
She can see the pain of them all but it feels lighter somehow, now. Like the retelling of a story which finally sees its own happy ending.
(I actually don't have an ending... I think I'm suddenly stumped 😳)
Z: "Hahahaha. I really did ramble."
"Bloody hell did I ramble 🙈"
"Hahahaaaa welcome to the jungle 🤣🙈❤️🌻🌿"
"Stories aren't owned by anyone, really. X"
S: "Thank you for sharing this with me ❤️ I'm sorry for all the shit you've had to deal with alone. It must have been really difficult. I will do everything I can to protect you from feeling like that again ❤️"
"I know ❤️🌻 I feel that. And I'll protect you too. I'm also rather green-fingered myself 🤣🙈🌻❤️"
"Gooood grief there's so much I missed out as well 🤣🤣🤣😬😬😬 More chapters another time maybe haha. X"
TBC... ASAP... AQAP...
