Here’s a simple and highly effective way to turbocharge your writing. Pick a picture and set a timer. Then go with your first impression. I went with stillness here and followed it for thirty minutes. You keep writing and let your flow, flow!
There’s something about him. He’s still. Still in his mind. Still in his body. He’s content. I tell him about my adventures, the shores I have visited and he smiles, imagining the worlds that I can tell he can actually see as I speak. Isn’t imagination wonderful? I say. And he smiles at me again. And after all the travelling, all the restless nights of my life, I relax, I fall into the stillness of him and warm my uneasy soul in his glow. Even my voice alters in his presence. Is this me I think, but it is. I’m not my outside, striving, volatile self in here with him. And it feels like another world, like a world up there in the cerulean skies where the horizons are infinite and too vast to judge or to find me.
Because there are those who are looking for me. . Of course you know that. I carry a dagger. More than one actually. I like my life sometimes.
Look at the way our hands are aware of each other. Of our shared humanity. The tips of my fingers are on fire as if they wanted to play music and I have never learned, it was not my family’s way. Action was our mantra. Still is. Though where those actions have taken my brothers I do not know. Only my mother remains at home with her suitors. She is now a widow. Wealthy. Fond of younger men I can see when I return to the house by the river.
Does she miss my father? I doubt any of us miss that man. Too cruel. Reckless. Bloated by conceit. I believe my mother when she tells me after a glass of burgundy that he fell into the river and was found weeks later, unrecognizable, in the mud. Only his blonde hair was a sign to claim him as our father. That’s what happens when it stops raining when the river grows thirsty and what lies beneath the surface is glimpsed again.
But I’m rambling. It’s the effect of this man.
This him. I have to stop talking.
Would you Look at this room? We’ve discussed all these strange instruments and he’s even played for me. And I am surprised to say that I actually paid attention, I listened to the music of his lute and to his songs, without drifting away back to the sea, back to those ports, back to those girls who claim they crave my company but then steal my purse when I am drunk and satiated.
. You wouldn’t think we’d have anything in common to look at us.
Dare I say, I like him?
I hope I can stay, for a while.