fractures {fiction & poetry}

They come crashing into my mind at the strangest of times. A solitary pair, a phrase, a sentence. Often complete in themselves but crying out for a backstory. They excite me, these words. They fill me with a longing to spend days at a battered old desk overlooking the sea, filling in the gaps with more words. The warmest, fluffiest socks, copious amounts of coffee and ink scratching onto paper as the waves beat and crash against the shore. But these words also fill me with an ineffable sadness. I never have, never had the confidence. Never believed in myself enough to even try to make something more out of them. And so they are left to rattle about in my mind, like someone’s lost property, unforgotten and never quite finding the ending to their story.

These faces, these many faces were created when she was young. She curated them with such precision, picking just the right one depending on the circumstance and the environment. It was never about deceit or manipulation but simply a survival mechanism that she had learned to hone and perfect so that she could avoid the toxic effluent that schoolgirls can be so expert at flinging. So that she could be the dutiful daughter or the brilliant student, the obliging friend. So that she could fight this unsettling feeling that followed her wherever she went; she never really fit in anywhere because she was the missing piece from a puzzle that she would never find.

Years later, when she looks back on her life she will realise that she never really had the chance to just live. She had never learnt, and never been taught, to shrug off her imperfections and say ‘well stuff them if they don’t like me’. She never really knew how to take off these faces, these masks, and smash them to the ground, obliterating them into so many, tiny, little pieces, so that only one true face was left and she could just be herself.

Recently, those little fractures that she had almost forgotten about have been letting the darkness in more and more.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have left them to fate, perhaps it was wrong of her to let what minute amount of optimism she had take over her and let her believe that they would fix themselves. Everyone knows that a puncture repair kit is only temporary after all.

He left on a Sunday as families tucked into their roast dinners, sheep grazed in their fields and the world continued to revolve slowly on its axis. After a perfect weekend of coffee in cafes and arm-in-arm walks she was blissfully blinded. So when he said ‘I love you but I can’t be with you anymore, it’s not fair’, it was the last thing she had expected. He was leaving her to chase the dream of a woman he had loved before her, a woman who had left him to travel half way around the world in search of adventure because their life together had been lacking. ‘I really believe you can love two people at once’ he said, was this some scant effort at making her feel better she wondered as the hot tears began to roll down her cheeks. He couldn’t bear to see her cry so he did what came to him instinctively, he put his arms around her and held her tight and one thing lead to another. Later as he got dressed and packed his things the sun began to set, sending shards of pinks and purples crashing silently into the cotswolds. And while the world carried on she sat in bed clinging to her duvet, trying to wring some comfort from it as she watched him leave for the last time.