Cosmia wrote:If we're moving onto prose I actually have something to contribute. This was 10 minutes of introspection, but hey, here we go.
Concrete
I close my eyes against the warm summer breeze. I could be anywhere; the imaginary grass bristles and glows golden in the dying sunlight, though only for a second. I soon break from my short-lived reverie and again gaze upon the familiar concrete walls.
One doesn’t often speak kindly of concrete walls but I am as attached to this part of my new home as I am any other. Awkwardly angled, slouching in amongst the possibly-Edwardian architecture, like the family friend of tenuous acquaintance that inevitably has to be invited to the party. It’s a surprise to get along with them so, we hadn’t heard good things. They too are bedecked in their evening finest, the pale grey stones warmed by the orange light of dusk.
I have come out here to escape the cloying humidity of my room, and the closeness of my walls. At first I reconsider- the day begins with T, and any day beginning with a T round here seems to belong to the bellringers, but for a moment they seem to have ceased. I am perched on the wall and leaning against the pebbledashed house. A forgotten book sits in my lap.
My mind wanders. I watch the starling flitting to and fro with wattling materials from its nest hidden in the undergrowth across the courtyard. A cheeselog lopes purposefully across the step. I again close my eyes, lose myself in the sprawling meadow, or perhaps a clifftop, now a humble park- it doesn’t matter. I could be anywhere.
I consider the happenings of the day. I consider my brief offer of work, and work that may follow, and soon my mind leaps to the oft considered question of long-term career. I entwine my fingers in whips of grass and bask in the sunlight. This is all I want to do; a life wasted, in the eyes of good society, a life where one can frolic and lollop and embark upon on all sorts of frivolous verbs. I want nothing more than to spend my life in a small woodland cottage, and pick flowers and herbs, to sit under a tree and strum at some stringed instrument. I could make a fair living from making pies and cakes, surely. It would be a sound, assured, morally-concrete existence. I would like that.
The recommencement of the church bells seem to me a providencial warning. Were I a God-fearing woman; nay, could I entertain the notion at all that a God did exist- I may have considered it a challenge. As a matter of fact it only goes to irritate me and drag me back mercilessly from my private Eden. No; this will not be the life for me. I will not choose my path, at least, not how I walk it. I will start off my adult life behind a desk in a bank, or perhaps waitressing, depending on how I play the next few years. But I can sit behind the desk and imagine the office furore to be the hustling wind in the hedgerows, and I can imagine the ever-trilling telephones to be an avian cacaphony. Not for long, of course, but it will suffice as a means to an end. I hold it quietly within myself that I’ll get what I want, somehow- the days when I no longer have to imagine concrete to be gold.
I love it. I particularly like how you compare a wall to a friend of the family at a party, and how you want to "imagine the office furore to be the hustling wind in the hedgerows, and [...] the ever-trilling telephones to be an avian cacaphony." I wish this was so in my case. I've worked in an office for six years and I'm afraid to say I don't have the imagination to conjure up these wonderful images. This is inspired stuff.