Lilly was a girl who found her tribe was nature itself. She wasn’t a hippy but she had a way of communicating and thriving on a, shall we say a floral level, more than the most of us. In any big city she would pause extra long passing by a flower shop. She’d say, ‘I’m breathing real air’. She could negotiate this tough new world while slowly it choked her.

Damage is the obvious reason. Damage from disappointment learned too early. Destined now to make crummy choices, to veer toward that which is toxic and crippling.

Perversely, the goal is to play the entire game again, from start to finish, every pass and fail, until it’s done right. As laborious as weaving threads to make your own Bayeux tapestry whereby you see the entirety of the story. The goal is vanquishment. True freedom.

Victorious over all demons. Those from whence, Lilly for example, was too small to protect herself. She learned from every whipping, each humbling. The wounds healed but scars were forever visible lank like snakes in the yellow tresses she wore to her waist.

She fell for this one and that one, always for the wrong reasons. For their looks. For their pushiness which she misinterpreted for passion. All that! It must be love, right?

And they each cut her and cut her down with words. One went so far as to machete the plants she grew, these her friends who she loved. They all made her cry. Each in turn disregarded her tiny wants and requests.

It was painful, no doubt, she got her fingertips squished many a-time. But it was the obstacle course that is life that she had to complete one step after another. No one knew her strength, her sure-footedness. No one except her, Lilly the girl who could canoe out to sea in the middle of the night and swim with the dolphins.

Game won she cut free. Thus she made her garden in paradise.

Exposé! I don’t have to think about vampires ever again. They were never my cuppa. When I learned they were from Serbia, not Transylvania as has been erroneously promoted, I figured I should own them.

image: http://www.leighvogel.com

Years ago I had some trouble with a boy. I was ten years old and he was fourteen, and he had a crush on me.

We were in a co-ed boarding school on the south coast of England, a bleak spot beloved by the locals for its white chalk cliffs and creepy foggy heaths. I hated it. I spent a good deal of time being bad and leading rebellions. On a nightly basis we’d break out and go ransack something.

But the boy, he started to make rules for me. He got possessive. And then he got physical. Nothing too drastic, except for the occasional fierce punch to my chest, “Where no one will see it,” as he’d say.

Today I got a message from him. He has discovered my email address and sent two messages. I won’t read them. Through the years he’s tried various methods of contacting me. I always ignore them. But I fear he is emboldened and I’ve seen my share of crime shows. So I know.

So I phoned my bestie and told her that if I was discovered hacked up he did it. I just wanted to lodge this information with someone. She said thanks you’ve cheered me up no end, now I’ve got this to worry about as I get through a huge day of chores!

But she’s brilliant, with only five minutes to spare she solved the problem. I can’t tell you what she advised as it would compromise the plan. If I don’t get stuck in the sand, so to speak, I’ll pull it off.

If I don’t, and if I’m found hacked, she’ll know who did it. She’ll write the last Sunday Story. My obituary.

https://youtu.be/H0sFSOqHNLM

https://youtu.be/YJ_QQbSCff0

♥︎

My friend Honey likes to say, ‘Don’t forget to look up’ which means so many things including its literal meaning, because, as she extrapolates, ‘You never know what you’ll see’.

So I gave it a whirl, and I looked up. To find a phantasmagorical character was gone.

He’s not dead. Thriving in fact. Trucking on down the smoky path of life. He’s doing beautifully. He is beautiful.

But in no way does he resemble my old friend.

For one thing he was 23. And that simply does not come around again. He had a purity. A sweetness.

With smooth skin and long eyelashes and a sculpted mouth which he covers with a finger when he speaks, overall a babyface, a cub-like innocence glowed with his shy smile. I have it preserved in a photograph. It’s grainy, I try to examine it closely, forensically.

He is a serious fellow. I know he will have a predictable life. No doubt full of laughter and love but he will achieve nothing of his artistic ambitions. They will occupy his spare thoughts and they’ll satisfy some of his need to express himself. He’ll take out his frustrations on his lovers.

The person I knew is gone. That kid has grown up, he ain’t shy no more. He’s even filled out just like a child who has finished growing. He looked so different. He spoke like a grownup. His sentences were pensive. But he was right. And it stung for all the wrong reasons, ego, but one should be grateful. Because, reality. Times were not the same. What if he had called my bluff? If he strode into my world, would I regret it? I know it.

I had looked up, I’d seen the miniature movie reel and I saw we were good on our paths. Pathways that vanish hurtling in different directions.

Love and let go, and look up.

image by www.leighvogel.com

Two months, that’s what he got. In retrospect it would become clear she’d sewn herself up safe from the start.

He chose to stay in the spread by the sea. He was permitted two more months, legally. He remained in a suspended state of shock and he wanted every second.

He knew nothing like this would ever happen again. Nothing even close. He had tasted the best of everything though. He had lived it.

She had been a witch to everyone he introduced her. And everyone swallowed it because she was a ‘movie star’. A big name in the 70s. She too was in her 70s and despite the dough and the countless treatments it was starting to show.

She kept to a diet of coffee and alcohol.

She was tolerated because of her fabulous past. A ‘movie star’ from television, loved and disdained all at once. Loved for her candy-cute acting, she could pout like a cherry. And she was fantastically wealthy.

She fell for him instantly, obsessively. She overwhelmed him, like a butterfly net, into which he willingly relaxed. They married. She worshiped him and she provoked the worst in him, “I’m not flying commercial again until I have to!’ he learned to declare. He was in her sway, hypnotized. He was slurping all the Chateau Kool-Aide within reach.

They were the show wherever they went. Everyone wanted to meet the ‘movie star’. Impossible to know exactly the start of the end but some supposed he had become too familiar. Had lost the plot. He thought all this was real.

One day she came home and stated she, ‘didn’t care anymore’.

He got a pay-off and two last months at the beach house. Her coldness toward him was dismantling, he barely ate or slept, he stared out at the ocean from the bedroom balcony. He would have trouble adjusting, walking on flat ground again. He never saw this coming. Dummy.