8th February 2016
Hello! Today’s blog post is a little different, and not just in terms of the written content itself. This blog post is something I’m genuinely apprehensive about uploading, whereas my others are usually fun to share with you all. As you may know if you follow this blog, my main aspiration in life is to forge a career in creative writing and, in doing so, be able to walk into my local bookstore and see my very own novel sitting proudly on a shelf there. While I’m far from crafting full novels just yet, I do still enjoy writing creatively. Today I wanted to share this with you. This is a short story I wrote for a creative writing competition at my college back in the Autumn, aptly titled ‘The Fall’. The title itself is actually double entendre, connoting both the seasonal ideals of a chilly Autumn and the idea of falling in love. Sounds clever – sort of happened by accident. The storyline is entirely fictitious and mostly based on the plotline of a film I watched around the time of writing, before you worry I’m profoundly emotionally unstable. It’s a little bit scary sharing something you’re deeply passionate about, because writing is meant to be ‘my thing’ so I hope I’m kind of alright at it. Either way, I’ve decided to pluck up the courage and share this with you and I really hope you enjoy.
The Fall
Today is the first day of autumn; precisely three hundred and sixty-five days since your glance first met mine. You had stars in your eyes that morning; so beautiful and so bright, and as you stared straight through me I drew galaxies in my mind.
It was a crisp morning, far enough from summer to have waned the soporific heat but yet not close enough to winter to feel the sharp bite of its cold embrace. Brilliant shafts of sunlight caressed the auburn carpet of leaves which crunched satisfyingly below me. Hues of amber and burgundy tessellated in the sky above, dangling from the trees which were not yet bereft of their seasonal gaiety. This was the type of morning you epitomised as perfection; fresh and chilly, but not cold – more like the gentle breath of opening a refrigerator door than the unforgiving blast of a winter storm. The truth, of course, was that the storm was yet to come.
Has no-one else bothered to tell you that your eyes are not just brown? No, they are so much more than just brown. Your eyes are copper and honey, gold coins on whirled mahogany, sunlight shining through whiskey. They are hot cocoa with flecks of golden syrup, a permanent hug like a blanket, framed in unflawed happiness by the creases of your smile.
You dress in all black but you have the most colourful mind. You are impeccably intelligent – but not boastfully so – and, though you are silent as a lamb, I saw the lion inside of you, roaring to be heard. You have universes behind your celestial smile and meteor showers in the pit of your belly. You burn hearts with brilliance and engulf souls with compassion. You truly are a work of art, but you were art long before I came to admire you and you’ll continue to be art despite my being gone. A masterpiece does not stop being a masterpiece simply because there is no-one there to see it.
I decided on you, don’t you get that? You have the arms that I want to be wrapped in and the eyes that I want to get lost in. It is your radiant smile that I could never resist, and the allure of your voice that I constantly find myself enraptured in. I decided on you – you and only you – yet you held me like heaven and then left me like I was hell. My lungs are clouded by the ghost of you and oh my god I can’t breathe.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I love you. I love that you’re an unmade bed; not perfect but still inviting. I love when you’re drunk and every acidic word that pours from your venomous tongue is honest and true. I love the way you dance out of time and sing passionately off-key. I love the way you allow yourself to drift to the clouds as you fall into the abyss of deep thought. I am in love with your breakdowns and your smeared make-up and your daydreams. I love you; it is as simple and as complicated as that.
So here I am, staring melancholically at my morning coffee, wishing that I hadn’t poured quite so much milk, because now it’s too creamy to resemble the colour of your eyes. Perhaps there is a parallel universe in which those eyes met mine and you fell in love with me just as hard as I fell for you in this one. You are a language I am fluent in but cannot communicate; an emptiness in my soul which I much preferred before I realised it was there.
Darling, loving you is the most exquisite form of self destruction.
By Jack Edwards