365 Day Writing Challenge 53: Tear-Jerker

53. Tear-Jerker: Watch a movie that makes you cry. Write a poem about that scene in the movie.

Inspired by (and some lines taken from) the last scene of The Truman Show

I could never do this beautiful, many-layered film justice but I tried to write about what Truman might be thinking, or what I would think if I was him.

***

Now I have touched the sky

where do I go?

 

Now that I know that the world is but a painting,

that someone was paid one day to sit and paint my sky –

(and went home and had his dinner like any other day)

He had created a world with his fingertips

not thinking that I would look upon his creation

every day of my life

sunrise to sunset

(God nestling among the clouds)

 

And the water too,

my fear, my enemy,

that woke me up at night,

choking,

with the taste of salt in my throat

is now passive,

weak,

while I walk

(I am walking on water)

upon it,

how can this be what took my father from me?

 

my father…

was he even –

and my mother?

Are they sad now?

Do they miss me?

Or are they already thinking about their next job?

Their redundancy pay?

 

My mind hurts

 

Maybe I’ll wake up in hospital

and this will all be the dream of a sick mind…

***

You can’t leave, Truman.

You belong here.

With me.

***

A voice came to me from the clouds

and it wanted me to stay with it.

I said no.

***

 

 

 

365 Day Writing Challenge 51: Sunrise/Sunset

51: Sunrise/Sunset: It goes round and round.
The sun rises and the sun sets.
No matter what you do, the world will carry on without you.

But that doesn’t mean that you don’t matter.

The Earth is like an old man, walking the same path he has walked many times before. You are a small thing to him, even smaller to the galaxy, the universe.

But you are still important. The more you do, the more you create, the more you give, the more alive you are, more human.

We may be small in the eyes of the universe, but we can be giants in our own eyes.

Celebration!

Today is an awesome day because I have now done FIFTY of my writing challenges! I’m so proud of myself for getting this far. And I got a notification yesterday saying that I now have a total 1000 likes! Thank you all for following and liking I love you all 😀

365 Day Writing Challenge 50: Just Say No

50. Just Say No: Write about the power you felt when you told someone no.

We say no for a reason.

We say no to tell the other person that

our minds are our own,

that we don’t want to share ourselves with another.

More than just a refusal,

it is a statement.

an act of war,

but mostly an assertion of ourselves

separate from the other.

 

 

365 Day Writing Challenge 44: Insult

44. Insult: Write about being insulted.

The worst part is when you can feel your face going red, and you’re begging internally for it to go away, for it to cool down, but the burning just continues to grow and grow. You try to screw yourself up into a tiny ball, so that no one can see you, to stare at your screen and revert into yourself. But it’s no good, all the laughter keeps hitting you like a hundred baseballs, small and hard.

I’ve been trying hard to be more positive, to hate people less, but this makes me feel like I was right to begin with, that I should retreat back into my castle and bring up the drawbridge.

365 Day Writing Challenge 35: War and Peace

35. War and Peace: Write about a recent conflict.

Funnily enough I was planning on writing a blog post on this anyway.
As part of my job I answer customer queries over email for a shoe website. This girl emailed me saying she was SO disappointed in our service because the shoes were NOT what she wanted and NOT how they looked on the website. And after she’d told her YouTube followers about us as well! (We looked everywhere for her YouTube and couldn’t find one, so that was bogus).

So I asked her what was wrong with the shoes. She said they were glittery and nowhere did it state on the website that they had glitter in them. I copied and pasted where it said it on the website and sent her a link to the page. She said, hilariously, “Well I can see that it does say that. However there are other faults that I will send you a picture of when I get home”. I waited with bated breath. Then she sent me a photo of a perfectly normal pair of trainers. She claimed that the right shoe was less glittery than the left and that the right shoe had “splodges” on it. I’ll spare you the boring back and forth that started after this, but the gist of it was that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the shoes, something she pretty much admitted more than once.

I told her she was getting a refund. She said she didn’t want a refund, she wanted an exchange. I was all ready to go in, guns blazing, and tell her she couldn’t have an exchange either, when Em, the girl who is training me at work, said that I should just give in. The shoes cost us around 6 pounds to make and she’s obviously not going to give up so you may as well just send them out to her, it’s not worth it”.

“But”‘ I said, “it’s not fair that she gets a free pair of shoes”. Em shrugged and said, “Well you can be firm with her if you want”. This was on Friday towards the end of the day. I said I’d think about it. On Saturday I spoke to my boyfriend about it. I even got so frustrated that I cried – I was just sick of working in customer service and having to say yes to people who did not deserve to be said yes to, and this girl was so blatantly just trying to get a free pair of shoes because she didn’t like the ones she had, and who was so stubbornly lying to me, who kept talking to me in an infuriatingly lofty, lawyerly way, who kept quoting the website of the company that I fricking work for, as if she was in the right when we both knew that she wasn’t.

But my boyfriend calmed me down (if you follow this blog this won’t surprise you). He said I could carry on arguing with her, but if she asked to talk to a manager I would put her through to Em who would just send her the shoes anyway. And he also said that we were still a small company, and sending a pair of shoes to someone who might recommend us to 2 more people was more important than saving ourselves money on a pair of shoes that cost us £6 to make. “But there’s my PRIDE”, I argued. “You have to let that go”. Ugh.

Falsehoods

The next person who tells me that my mother is a good mother/great person/aren’t you lucky gets hit in the face.

Brain Status

Argument: Life is short. You have to do everything you can, snatch every opportunity, write, go out, go to poetry events, make every second count.

Counter-argument: Part of my anxiety is not being able to relax, thinking that everything I do is not good enough and I need to do everything, and I need to do it now. I’m doing really well at the moment being easy on myself and relaxing more so shut up.

Five minute later

Argument: Life is short, you have to do everything you can…

This is the status of my brain at the moment.

Me Talking to My Anxiety

(Image from CareerCapitalist)

365 Day Writing Challenge 11: Dragon

11. Dragon: Envision a dragon. Do you battle him? Or is the dragon friendly? Use descriptive language.

 

Dragons are not good or evil. They are like people, they are complicated. But there is one important difference: dragons are wild. They are dangerous and they will hurt you if you say or do the wrong thing.
This one looks at me evenly, eyeing me up and down. I can tell by the sheen of its scales that it is a relatively young dragon, only a couple of hundred years old. This doesn’t mean anything of course. Dragons don’t mellow with age.
His scales are dark purple, a rarity which I am sure he is aware of. He keeps raising his neck, swishing his tail so his scales catch the light. This doesn’t mean to say that all dragons are vain. Lots of them are. But a few couldn’t care less about their appearance. I met one who clearly hadn’t cleaned his scales in centuries. He had a coat that was grey with either dust or age, probably both. He had had sleepy eyes and a lazy smile. For a second I had had to remind myself of my own rule that all dragons are dangerous, because he just looked so harmless. I just wanted to be friends with him.
But anyway, back to Obsaquin (for that was the purple dragon’s name). He flicked his tail as he watched me, and I realised it wasn’t just vanity – it was watchfulness too.
“All I ask,” I said, as clearly and as respectfully as I could, “is safe passage through here.”
“Why do you say safe passage?” Obsaquin asked. “Why do you think your passage through here would be unsafe?”
Flick. Flick. Flick.
“Ah, I merely meant-”
“Well then you must say what you mean!”
His voice reverberated around the cave. He was enjoying this.
I tried to keep my face impassive. Obsaquin was small fry. I had met the Lord of the High Dragon Council, Tallo, the Sorceress. I bet Obsaquin hadn’t.
“If I do let you pass….” Obsaquin continued, still playing his little game, “what is in it for me?”
It was getting difficult to hide my impatience.
“The knowledge that you have helped a traveller along her way,” I said, keeping the sarcasm in my voice to a minimum. “Hmm…” he said, pretending to think. I began to reach into my bag. “Not good enough!” he roared, and a plume of fire shot from his grinning lips. I rolled out of the way, but the fire kept coming. All I needed was a second…Damn. I had given Obsaquin too much of a chance, and now I wouldn’t have time to hit him with the potion. I would have to cast a spell instead, which would be much more difficult.
As I ducked and dodged, I tried to think which spell to use. Then it came to me. Perfect. I found a large cauldron and ducked under it, wedging it in a corner of the cave where it would be hard for Obsaquin to move it. He was still in a playful mood, however, for he simply spat more fire at the iron, laughing.
Now came the difficult part. I had to think of cool, and cold. And ice. In a boiling hot cauldron while having fire spewed at me. But I did it. I closed my eyes and thought. I thought of a lake frozen over with ice. I thought of how cold it would feel to fall through the ice, into the freezing water below. Of the quiet beneath the ice. And then I said the Words.
I opened my eyes. The noise from outside had stopped. Another one of Obsaquin’s games? Carefully, gingerly, I looked out from under the cauldron.
Obsaquin was completely frozen. His fire, still shooting from his mouth, was frozen too. His eyes glinted like sapphires. I took out my bag and took out the herbs I needed. I placed them carefully in a circle around Obsaquin. Then I communed with the magic. I told it to thaw Obsaquin out, slowly. I told it to erase his memory of the last twenty minutes.
I swung my bag over my shoulder and headed for the door. I stopped for a second, deciding whether to take some of Obsaquin’s gold. I decided against it. He was only young, after all.