time
cw: death
hello, i’m sam! i write fantasy/scifi with touches of romance, mystery, horror and weird. i also enjoy writing niche fanfic, poetry and short prompts!
cw: death
i don’t know.
we build communities and monuments, cults and towers, to try and find out.
prompt as question and response
cw: self-harm / violence towards self, body horror injury, gore
In the past tense, we were good, we were beautiful; in the present, good becomes something else.
Both of these things can be true; to hold two truths in one hand, it is juxtaposition that eludes us. (perhaps it might heal us.)
How can a human hold such contradictions within them and not combust when they yearn to be absolute?
Easier to catch a burning comet, where the pain would be redeemed by the touch of something impossible by any other measure.
To know that we had it in our hand, even for a moment.
Or perhaps starry skies and nebulous truths are one and the same: both marvellous phenomena to guide us when we are lost.
(Even when they make us feel so uncomfortably small.)
It’s quiet.
My days used to be filled with music. I would rise with a gentle, wordless melody and patiently wait for you to wake so our duet may begin. I’ve never been a loud person but you made me musical. Together, we could sing an imperfect chorus every time. Like jazz, it was ruckus, it was noise, it was good and it was fun.
Today, I wake up in the dawn and it is so quiet.
The memory is still fresh, we’d rehearsed our final verse as last night melted into morning. We’d looked at each other, singing harmony but my lines echoed just a beat behind yours. And afterwards, I didn’t sleep – how could I?
How could I sleep when – in that moment, we were Stevie looking at Lindsay in 1982: unable to look away, chained together by this angry, anguished dissonance. A furious rage possessed every note that brought our song closer to its end, but we didn’t stop until it was over.
And now, the sun is rising and the rage is gone. It is quiet and I miss you.
But like everybody else who has ever loved and lived, I must face the dawn.
I think of a song we never sang together, one with no anger in the words, only a grieving acceptance. My favourite part goes:
the war is over and we are beginning,
here it comes, here comes the first day,
it starts up in our bedroom after the war.
I sing it to myself, not quite giving voice to the notes. My whisper fades to silence and I take a shaky breath, my cheeks wet and my chest heaving.
It will take time – more dawns and midnights than I can count – but I will remember how to sing a solo again.
prompt as question and response
She comes to my mind first, with her bright smirk. A teenager who knew it all, who’d done it all, who led the way with her youthful spirit. At twenty-something, she still liked to call cola ‘rum’ and pretend to be a pirate as she drank it.
Our ages are a contradiction: she’ll always be older and wiser in my memory but next year, I’ll be older than she’ll ever be.
I wrote her a poem once, I hope she got a chance to read it. I lost the email and I forgot how it goes.
I can’t think of love without also remembering grief.
He’s an angel dozing in the morning sunlight. He forgets to text sometimes (and so do I). He finds a challenge and sees nothing but the next step in front of him, and then the next, and then the next. He keeps going.
I’ve learnt so much.
I’m re-learning how to want things again: I want to touch, I want to cry, I want to part the southern sea between us.
We’re an oh moment, accompanied with wide, beaming smiles. But somehow, our moment doesn’t end, only pauses for air. One day, I’ll figure out the exact science of how we met, how our moment keeps happening, how we keep going.
For now, I have just this moment and it is good.
The house is held together by… a force I can’t name. It’s some miraculous, binding formula of truth and lies, words used to hurt and silences used to soothe. Love and all its complications.
Is it nosy questions about a toad’s religious beliefs? Is it inside jokes about an infamous Wookie temper and clumsy, fiddling hands? Is it subtle judgements of love like 'you eat instant noodles everyday now’ and 'take this vitamin supplement’? Or is it the mystery of never-ending generosity?
I know it’s not the unspoken truths that we tiptoe around. Like her cooking is getting worse; there is no god but there may be comfort; time is passing faster than any of us know.
Time is passing… time is passing so fast.
I think it’s her, I think she’s the force holding this house together.
I think of friendship in two ways: before and after I met you. (I don’t think I could go back to the way I used to do things.)
There’ll always be two chairs reserved for you in my cosy home, so have some tea and vegan cookies and tell me about your day.
Tell me more, tell me everything.
Do you sometimes feel rather like a woodland critter? Me too! I thought I was the only one.
I feel like I am newly rehabilitated in the woods where I was born. I think I’m doing what I was always meant to do: snuffle and explore and find the next little morsel to eat? It feels familiar but my paws are still clumsy and new.
But in these woods, I’ve made a new friend, one who’s hunting for the same thing, our paths overlapping in the undergrowth. My friend is a kind and wise critter, cute as a button and tougher than they look.
I’m not very good at this critter business of being myself yet, but as I learn, I’m glad I get to share and roam these woodlands with you.
My name is sam. I am seven years old. I have a tortoise named Sally. She is one year old. Her name is because she has a shell but I don’t like the name 'Shelly’.
A tortoise is NOT a turtle, because they live on land. If they have a stumpy tail, they’re a girl but honestly, who knows?
They like to eat lettuce. Animal poop is gross.
I packed the past into a suitcase. Photos, birthday cards, diaries, I brought it all with me when I moved. It contained all the remaining evidence of a life I used to live, the lingering touches of a place I would never return to.
It was heavy with meaning and memory and I never unpacked it.
Some part of me feared that in breaking the seals, I might tarnish the contents in some way. In a new light, under layers of dust, would it look different, empty, with something irreplaceably missing?
To open it would shed light on the mystery like a final farewell.
But -
Years later, I wonder.
If I looked inside now, might time have healed old wounds? Would the holes be sealed and the heavy absence replaced with lightness? Could memories still bring me joy without also the accompanying grief?
I don’t know why but the suitcase is getting lighter and lighter. I’ve grown lighter, with every day that takes me further into my life.
I think I’ll be ready to open the suitcase some day soon.
prompt as question and response
in the hour when all is stripped bare
in the shadows before sunrise
i whispered to you:
yes, i did mean for it to hurt you
and all quiet-like, you said to me:
so did i
and so healed we, together
in the dawn of our confessions
#poetry #prompts #nosebleedclub
prompt as a question
The first thing she does is dust the memories off from the shelves. The shelves stand silent, uncreaking by their years, frozen under the bending weight of a lifetime in this cosy nook in the middle of nowhere.
Back then, she'd have called it a museum... if it'd ever gotten any visitors. In her absence, she'd left it open to anybody in the know but still, in the years she's been gone, she is the first to step foot within.
The dust brings her to tears, or perhaps it is the memories? Whichever it is, it triggers her allergies.
She'd come prepared: to tie her hair back, roll her sleeves up, and scrub the surfaces clean of their accumulated filth and grime. But everything was cleaner than she'd expected, just aged under a thin layer of dust.
Books with spines stiff, pages of letters yellowing with time, dim photos beholding brighter memories. Thick folders of old notes and recipes and napkins scribbled with ideas and other cut-out articles, earmarked always for a rainy day with free time that never came. Little crafts all throughout her shelves and cabinets: a bracelet from a beloved sibling, a quilled card from friends fallen out of touch, old tickets to places she couldn't remember with people she couldn't forget.
She'd held onto everything that had mattered.
And that presents a problem, because none of it matters now. She has a one-way ticket to her future, and she doesn't have any room to bring the past with her.
(Not that it's a bad thing, the past. It's just taking up too much real estate and she needs to be practical.)
She needs to clean it all out and leave nothing behind.
It shouldn't be this hard.
There wasn't anything that couldn't be cherished in a different form, like digital photos, their essence captured without the solid weight.
But time changes a person and sometimes, that person is pissed at themselves for twenty years lost and changed and irreversibly grown. Sometimes, they wanna burn it all to the ground by the time they get to the end.
The 'museum' used to be her prison as much as it was her sanctuary: where she'd found comfort in familiarity, she'd also found anxiety of the unknown, the greater beyond the four walls she'd called cosy.
She looks at her treasures – sits cross-legged in the middle of the floor and sorts them one by one – and sees how cheaply they were made, precious more in misery than in joy.
She doesn't know what to do with the juxtaposition: the need to make room for the new, the urge to protect the space that once was.
Footsteps come in after her.
(The museum's second visitor; the first, if you don't count her.)
Being an ever -prepared museum curator, she used to plan out her tours: how she'd lead a newcomer through her life, explaining every detail. She doesn't know if she still has what it takes, if the words can still leave her lips, if they even have enough time to spare for her to say it all.
He's all loose-limbed and lanky in the doorway, hands in pockets, unhurried. He takes turns looking at her, and looking around.
“Are you okay?”
She nods, quick to the familiar answer, but a beat later, she gives him a shaky smile. “This was me... before, before I was free.”
These were the things that matter so little now, but mattered then. They shaped her, often in ugly ways, but who would she be without them?
“I don't like most of it anymore,” she adds.
“Why?” he asks, simply.
“It pales in comparison to now... how can twenty years mean so little?”
He pauses. “Hey... just look at what you built, all by yourself. It was your whole world, yes, but it gave you everything you needed to survive.
“You're not leaving it behind, you're just making your world bigger than before.” He takes her hand. “Think about what you can build, once we knock those walls down and there's nothing to hold you back anymore.”
“I don't know what to build,” she admits, softly, “I had all these plans... but I don't want to follow them anymore.”
“Then let's make something new altogether, something nobody'll see coming!”
She can't help a giggle at his wink. “I'm not used to being unpredictable.” Not used to being somebody new, different from who she once was.
“Well, whoever you turn out to be, I'm already a fan.” He says, with more confidence than he ought. “And whoever you were before, I want to know.
“You can always give your past to me to cherish when you cannot.”
So she does.