The compelling

She sat at the blurry end of the bar; sipping her dry Gin, dry as her ability to love, in tiny, erratically spaced intervals between her perfectly timed drags. She hid her face into the obliterating light away from the cheerful levity around her. She watched beams of fluorescent light merge and diverge, and converge back again. It was timed. Timed like her affairs with comforting strangers. A pattern to everything, planned and postulated, rehearsed and rerun. She takes a gander at her watch, 12.30am. “Here we go” she tells herself, addressing that irresolute part of her, which needed attendance.

She sometimes wished she was wholly consumed in industry, in a hobby or even the daily humdrum. She sometimes liked to bake (averagely tasting pumpkin muffins) and hated herself for constantly tasting the batter as she beat it. She washed dishes to cleanse herself off the crud of a recent unrequited romance and sometimes rested her head on the cabinet in front, closing her eyes in a blank reverie, while holding a dish as the water ran. She wondered if she looked clumsily distracted while she picked up the wrong cereal from the endless cereal aisle at the store (she loathed being clumsy). But somehow the mundane failed to accommodate her waywardness.

Now here, in this dive, a conundrum of perfumes fills the already chaotic air with contemplation. Strangers stare at her and she stares back into their strangeness. The blaring noise helps her drown the concerns she usually battles with staring at the ceiling, lying in her big empty bed, which seems to get bigger and emptier at nights. She watches her legs, imperfect because they stop short of the ground, but she loves them, at least tonight, glistening and full of grace. She requests the night to be kind, in company or in idleness. If not calming, then numbing at the least. If not fulfilling, then terse at the least. Neon throws a smoke ball into a coloured cloud and she watches it float and crash into a big man’s back. Crash and splatter into pieces, never to be put back together. She tries to ignore it; tonight she wants to be put together. Or be attempted at, at the least.

BUT, she is ready to learn of the power of love

art title - Neon

artiste - The Abstract Art Store

url - here

The technicolour coat of passive optimism

The air these days is impregnated with anticipation and crispness. Hope floats, not just in corporeal hearts, but even those hibernating barks and boughs, heavenly dormant and silently breathing all winter, bundling up sustenance for a vernal celebration. I wake up to the twitter of an obscure songbird and not the hissing of congealed air. The windows clatter with the mirth of being released from locks, doors to the patio begin to get ready for the opening act of the season. The dreary yellow has started to hue a welcoming shade of green. Parks have begun to look more affable (the way squirrels have begun to look less timid).

When you open your palms and close them back, a fistful of air crumbles inside them. When you sigh a deep sigh, the essence of an impending bloom traps inside your nostrils. When you look towards the sky, clarity is strewn between the occasional cloud and the newly gathered sun. Orchestrated happiness befalls you. As much as you detest it, resist it, desist it, it wraps around the casket of your misery and penetrates so virulently, so helplessly, leaving you weak, at the hands of imposed, almost inflicted joy. Seasonal merriment dictates your pessimism. All you can do is lay back and slump inside your quilt of woven feelings and let this season of serendipity replace the scratchy cynicism that you have long been wearing to keep warm from the cold.

art title - Hope

artiste - Heidi Daley

image url - here