Thoughts uninterupted...

“Hello”,

I said it softly, not to wake the motionless spider that hovered petrified in the frozen web, or even to send a tremor through the icy cold air that made my skin shimmer on this frostiest of mornings.

I was at college, and had spent three days in a brooding heavy mood, one that my brother might have called a ‘sulking, and pouting strop’, (I have had a few of those in my time too), this time it wasn’t the silent treatment of the precocious child in me. The splendour of winter’s elegance was wasted on me that year, for every day felt unfulfilled. As if the heaviness of unforgiving mental mirrors that reflected back all that I wanted to improve or change within myself bound by the sense of failure that I was somehow unable to affect change. The changes were never superficial ones concerning any self-images, but more about how disenchanted I was with the focus many of my friends appeared to have on material vestiges of their perceived success. Some would boast of their latest vehicles, others were proud to admit that they wanted to be financially superior to those who they felt had downtrodden them... with a typical 'I will show them'... driven bent to their vision of success.

“Can I come in, do you think?”
I asked who was there at the house, a small terrace, 'railway terrace', that my friend Marc, a recently ‘outed’ man had moved into with his boyfriend, a cruise-ship steward.

He gave me a warm hug, and then we both shivered.

“Come in my precious Snow Queen!”

He reminded me that I had a key anyway. I smiled, it was a private joke, for he always saw me in (synthetic) furs, and my so-called ‘cool indifference’ excited him as a person. We always seemed to meet around the end of autumn, sometimes when winter was arriving. It was then that we would ‘hook up’. Due to his role which required him to travel abroad a lot and it was on one of these journeys that he had decided to provide me with a key to his small cosy home, I was friends with his Tabby cat, a creature rather like me...

My residence which I shared with several girls was miles away from the college campus, and he was away a lot, so he had no problem with my using his home, whilst cat-sitting in return.

I told him I wasn’t expecting him home and as I said this I dropped my small cream vanity case with its few essentials onto his foot, as I felt my arm go limp and frowned at myself in his old rococo mirror hanging behind the rather threadworm but comfortable sofa. My face in Winter always appeared the colour of walnuts, but I looked gaunt and lean, something that often happens when I am really busy. His vanity proved that each of us are prey to age and delusions, for there were several jars of face creams, aftershaves and other men's beauty products left loose in his open suitcase laid by the coffee table from his latest trip.

“Can we have a picnic-breakfast?”

“It is freezing, outside and I have just had a hot bath, so I am likely to die out there…” then seeing my disappointment and my lip curl as it does when I am in half smile and not sure if I am on that line between being true to myself or the surface calm that we each have to display, he acquiesced graciously.

“Okay give me a moment, be still my heart, I adore you but I could throttle you”, he quickly accepted my idea, and as he went into the kitchen he flicked the filtered coffee machine on, and set two mugs ready shouting bulletins about his partner, and asking what I fancied for breakfast, but adding that it would be a spartan and austere meal, since he had only been back three days and had intended to be out most of the weekend. His older sister usually dropped by with groceries for him as she ran a small corner health store selling a variety of nuts and pulses.

I stared into the middle distance where day dreams are only half emerging and then I waited until he carried out the coffee mugs, his beautiful hands cupping mine as he handed it to me so that I reached for the handle. He smiled as for a second our eyes met, and we both felt the recognition of knowing a caring Friend... and then he said nervously brushing his almost coffee coloured long hair out of his eyes, “So how have you been?”

I looked up and stared at him for a while, almost in a daze, and then replied crisply, “Just daydreaming, I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything functional or practical for days you know!”

“So has anything happened?”

“Nope, well yes”

“Okay I am listening, oh wait, I will just get my coat”.

He had one of those wonderful camel overcoats, I loved the colour it was warm and almost a deep gold, he always looked handsome and rather like a business man in it. I watched him pull up his collar and then we both walked out into his garden.

As I trotted ahead of him and then waited for him to open the gate at the end of the garden for me to slink through, he handed me a small tissue wrapped gift.

The garden was unusual, sunflowers grew along one side of the garden, and ivy seemed to choke everything else, there was a small wishing well that was purely cosmetic, and three well weathered gnomes each fishing in the grass, with chipped faces, and broken rods. At the end there was a small black gate with a recently painted picket fence that ensured that you did not fall into the stream that was only eighteen feet from the fence. The edge of a small stream that ran at the bottom of all these pretty terraces, was covered in the jewelled stems of purple loosestrife and bracken depending on the season...

The messy lawn was covered with icy frost, and it was only 7.45 a.m, I had been up since six, and was returning from the gym... with the sun just beginning to melt the edges of the bushes where it could shine unhindered by trees or buildings.

We watched as a neighbour came out and retrieved a frozen pair of briefs and socks from the washing line that sprinkled ice on the tabby that was huddled on the lawn watching some small invisible rodent.

We all smiled the surface smile of polite social exchanges, ones where no more would be revealed apart from acceptance of each others space and territory.

I hadn’t noticed the two large cushions from the sofa that Marc had carried with him, and now he laid them at the edge of the stream’s bank, and we both sat down on these, with me bringing my knees up close to my shoulders, and hugging them between staring into the stream that seemed so slow today.

I shared the anecdote that haunted me and he smiled and several times nodded silently, once in a while he would take a strand of my hair and stroke it between long elegant fingers, and at one point as I stared ahead of me, he rested his head on my shoulder and took a long strand of my hair and tucked it into his mouth, holding it through his teeth, until I turned my face down to looked closely into his hazel eyes, and half-smiled the smile that conveyed an obscure message of incomplete thoughts.

I felt the rapture of finding myself closer to some truth inside my mind that I had searched for with a sense of newly-trodden snow therein.

Then I said, “So will you make me some breakfast?”
He released my hair and he smoothed it down over my back and then he took my beret off my head, shook it, and smoothed it too, and placed it back onto my head tidying my hair which had ruffled as he had removed it.

‘”I will see what I can do…”

“… and would you make sure that whatever you bring me is given to me in a memorable way, I don’t care what it is…. I just need to eat something prettily presented, and can we have incense sticks here, at any rate I want to remember today as long as I live, I think I have learnt something and I want to cherish the moment… I just don’t feel like talking, I just want to sit here and think.”
Unchained thoughts, uninterrupted were my favourite kinds.

He smiled, and he repeated, “I will see what I can do….”
In the distant the smell of coal and wood burning reminded me of the romance of a fireplace and for a moment I felt the realisation that being there, in the cold early morning was an imposition.
Despair would always crowd my thoughts, when I felt I wasn’t somehow being productive.

Within fifteen minutes he returned, with a tray, which he laid on a small wooden bench that was inside the fence, behind us. He came back over to my side, and I watched him light the sticks with long matchsticks that were blue tipped and from Egypt. I pocketed the matchbox and he smiled when he saw me do so…. I have always loved matches and matchboxes, for many of my poems have been initiated on them….

“… No, don’t take that one, you already wrote on it for me….here look”
“So I did”.
I shrugged.

Then he reached over the small wooden picket fence and picked up the tray, and laid it down in front of me.I smiled, he had made more coffee and the toast was cut into little men with a gingerbread-men metal cutter. He had buttered them and some had marmalade and some lemon-curd, and others still had strawberry jam… the final ones had blackberry conserve smeared on them. He had used chocolate and milk buttons to decorate these with eyes. As a final touch he had used a spray cream to dress some in frocks and to give others beautifully wild snowy ‘Afros’. He looked proud at his own creativity. As he waited for me to take one, I reached for his face in both hand and gave him a big kiss on the forehead.

I smiled broadly, and he said, grinning back, that the jams were from the hotels miniature complimentary jars.

I nibbled on these and stared back into the middle distance.

“Why the incense sticks?”

“I just wanted to remember spring; I miss its scents and newness - it seems so far away now”.

“I see”.

I then remembered the small gift, and I used my teeth to tear it open, then smiled when I saw that a small bottle of 'Joy', a rather lovely perfume fell out, I opened the beautiful bottle and had no idea that I would only know one other woman for the remainder of my life that wore it, she was the beautiful mother of a friend.

Then we waited for spring to return… shivering at the urgency with which we both knew I wanted to meet with it again, for I longed for it with a deeper sense of yearning than I knew how to express.

At some point I noticed that he had placed a wrapping around my shoulders, and shivered noticeably even through the beautiful black shiny Astrakhan (polyester, not fur) that I felt enclosed in… and in those deep thoughts, I had dropped a woollen glove in the stream and it was about thirty feet down caught on some frozen branches that dipped into the silvery sparkling, thawing stream.
He patiently let me free my thoughts silently out into the space ahead of me and then when I began stirring from my daydream he smiled and gave me a warm hug, and said… “Okay?”

I watched my glove free itself and drift out of reach forever, I did not feel I needed to retrieve it.

“Yep,” I replied, and followed him back to the house dragging his queen sized duvet across the wet frosty lawn….



.... Were your thoughts interrupted when you really wanted to daydream today? ...