Spellbound and Swallowed

The box held all the stories, half stories, snippets written on pages torn out of notebooks, a few scribbles on theatre programmes and menus. Attempts at film outlines and plays are layered in with poems, unfinished letters. It was a library full of information about the past. A couple of memory sticks joined the jumble. Memory seems an appropriate description of them, because that is what they hold, memories, though flash drive seems a more popular term for them now. Flash is a good descriptor too, flashes of memory, floodlit moments.

There is no room for the diaries, one for each year. She started a diary at the age of eight. They occupy their own space and hold more specific information about a day including even the mundane dentist visit and hair appointment, family birthdays. For years she got a page a day diary for Christmas. When writing the book started, they were the go to for reminders of when a particular event happened. They were the way her mother, who broke all the rules by rooting through her drawer to find the hidden diary, found out about the smoking dope at college, about the sex, about how much she hated her mother and her life. Her mother wanted to know the truth, finding it was probably worse for her than being ignorant of it.

She is flicking through them because, yet again, just as the memories have quietened, the sensation of him sliding in to the spaces between thoughts has muted, someone posts a ‘Hey, does anyone remember..’ and the reminiscences start. All the sensations and scents and squirm of anticipation ride back in carrying flags bearing dreams of sheet tangled nights and grabbed opportunities. Slowly, slowly the snatches of a scene squeeze through the gap of pretence that none of it mattered, none of it was important, none of it was real, none of it happened.

The ladies toilet, him unzipping his jeans, his busy, bulbous prick springing through the gap. Pushing up her skirt, parting her hair and her lips with his finger which is thick, nicotine stained. He leans in to her…

The description in the diary is graphic. 10,000 nerve endings spark up and the desire and the weeping begin all over again.