Silence

I was walking. Just walking. Walking as I did when I was young and wanted to think things over. Walking to nowhere in particular, because I felt you have to be lost before you can be found.

That day I just wanted to be by myself, in the muffled silent forest that I had loved as a child. I wanted the silence I hadn't had for years. The silence the voices in my mind would not grant me until I shook them off. Prized them off my mind with the chisel of peace that came from the forest. So I don't know why I came across that place, when all I was seeking was silence.

The sign said NO HOPE.

There was a green slime coating the caravan. Not that anyone cared. It looked like no one had been in it for years, if anyone could have been bothered to live in it in the first place: it was so small I cannot see anyone staying in it for long.

The caravan must of remembered their distaste, for it exuded an air of misery, wet summer and broken  promises.

Though it was a sunny day, the caravan cast own shadow, dark and long, eveloping the flimsy, starved grass. They tried to escape, pleading strands calling for an unheeding sun, reaching as high as their emaciated bodies would allow. Cushions of brown moss bubbled from the roof like cancerous warts, pushing off the green fronds that hung like souls clinging to the cliff over hell.

The caravan wasn't the only thing there. Great rusty teeth of some outdated farming equipment shared a bramble bush with the huge spiked wheel of a combine harvester; the big brown brush of the hairdresser from hell. Rolls of chicken wire were straggled like unholy tinsle among the old pines, chittering and squeaking at my progress across the graveyard of agricultural giants, observing my dazed wanderings as I felt my sanity waver once more, the same thoughts going round and round.

This was my forest. I knew it all. This was my forest. My forest of hope and peace where I came to be free. How can this place exist in MY WOODS?

I would have lost the voices. I am sure I would have, if I had not found that place. The place where that caravan sat. Supported by the briers around it, that grew through the windows, tearing through the flower patterned curtains. Tearing through the peace. Tearing a hole in my mind, and letting the voices flood back. They screamed and jabbered at me. Taunted and teased me, as they had before. But there were voices missing. The voice that told me it would be OK, as long as I looked ahead and ignored the others. The ones that whispered the dreams that would be my future as long as kept on going. The ones who had sacrificed their individuality to bring the silence. They had gone. Sucked up to fill the void the sorrow of the place. Caught on the briers that spilled like thorny tears from the smashed windows.

That broken dilapidated place must take all dreams from the future. Trap them in a caravan, cover them in green slime, and put up a new sign to condense the atmosphere in that place.

The place where dreams fled from.

The place where you could not see the future.

The place where the all my hope vanished.

The doctors tried to help me of course. After the farmer found me in the junkyard, arms streaked with blood and rust where I had scraped them against the blades of a plough, not caring if I lived or died. They say I will get better, but I do not need the voices to tell me that he is wrong. I will never be better. And he will never understand why. Because he has never felt what I have felt,

has never been to the place where I found NO HOPE.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

It’s a real place you know

I found it beneath the silent pines

So I walked home and started to write a story about a caravan that had a sign that said NO HOPE.

But then the story stopped and the only way I could keep it alive was to go back there.

So I did.

But it was a different kind of sorrow this time.

There was a woman there...the owner I think.

How can she treat me like a two year old who knows nothing?

“Have you got your phone?” I could almost hear the “dearie” on the end

“Are you sure you won't get lost?”

I was lost. I wanted to be lost so I could lose that place.

But because of you and your stupid caravan I know exactly where I am!

Exactly where I should have never found.

Because that caravan has a white sign that says

LAST HOPE

So I ran from her and I wrote this. The sun as gone and the rain has started to freeze and it is all I can do to write, shelter the page from the water that falls around a huddled shape alone in the forest she once called her own.

The trees knock and squeak. The birds heed my coming and flee my troubled mind.

I am scared.

This story was never meant to be so personal. I was not supposed to be the one left with one LAST HOPE.

All my characters have names, but I never mention them in the story. It is because I know these people. They may be fictional, but I know them. They have pasts. They have lives.

 The stories write themselves, I merely guide them to the right place.

All of my characters find peace.

Thomas sails from Megane and salvages his life.

Sophia leaves her grief over Mark, and frees herself from the voice in the wind to become someone.

Their names always come to me once I have finished their story.

Not this one.

She is the only one who purposely went out to free herself.

She was the only one who failed.

And all the way through I knew what her name was. I always knew her past.

Her name is Katy and her past is my present.

I am so sorry Katy...

I should never have written this story.

I should have never gone back there.

WebRep   currentVote     noRating noWeight