I found myself on that narrow borderline, where I seemed comfortable enough until my clothes started to wear out, where I could survive until any little thing went wrong. It felt like I had tripped but hadn't started falling yet. I was at all times reaching out, grabbing at the air, calling for the wind to hold me up. On borrowed time, they say. I was defaulting.
Daily stories
A tiny story every day.
The stories have all got mixed up. You pull a sword from the stone and all the evils of the world fly out. You kiss a frog and it turns into a wolf. There you go, trying to put them all back in order and only getting yourself more muddled. There are fairies in the mountains and dragons in the woods. It's no good trying to mend things now. There are new stories to learn.
It didn't take long to untie a few knots, loosen a screw here and there, and put a dab of glue where glue ought not be. A little rearranging of the world to make it safer, like cutting a firebreak. The machine would start again tomorrow, even so. But every knot retied and screw tightened was a choice, one that could be made differently. The machine would start again every day, until one day it didn't.
Between the channels on the radio, if you listen long enough and gentle enough, there are voices whispering. Sometimes there is strange music, a melody you never quite hear properly but find yourself humming days later. It's an enchanting place, between the channels, in the static and the noise. You feel you are discovering something deeper and truer. You aren't. Turn the dial again. Tune back to one of those stations you have been ignoring. There are real voices there, and real music. Listen long and gentle. This is what you were searching for.
Auntie Mona had the biggest tub of biscuit cutters you've ever seen, and somehow she knew exactly what was in there. One of us would name a shape, she would reach in, and there it was. A mushroom, a Pikachu, a battery, Australia. We thought: there's no way they all fit in there. She must be magic. So when Mum and Dad went away for the weekend and we stayed over, I crept down in the night and had a look. I tipped them out onto the floor, and I was right: there was no way to fit them back in.
After two hours in the lift, someone answered the emergency call button. You need to think more positively, they said. This idea of being trapped is keeping you in the lift. When you feel stuck, take ten deep breaths. Ask yourself: why do I believe this thought? And try to get out of the lift just a little bit each time. She tore the panel off the wall with a strength she didn't know she had, and used the edge of it to lever the doors open. At the reception desk, a smiling man in a suit greeted her. There we go, he said. I'll mark you down as a success.
Dad was sitting in a folding chair by the open kitchen door, looking out into the dark. He was worried he had upset the cat and she wouldn't come home. "Of course she'll come home," I said, "Don't worry." He smiled as best he could and said, "I know she will. I'm just daft, you know that." All through the night I heard him shaking the bag of treats. I thought about the time I got lost in the shopping centre and he didn't even notice. Curled at my feet, the cat was the only one asleep.
There was the tiniest piece of grit in the salad, and she bit down on it every time: a boulder between her teeth, the way things feel big in the mouth. When she was done chewing she rolled it to the tip of her tongue, and then to a finger. A beautiful little thing, crystalline and perfectly itself. She wasn't used to washing salad. At the supermarket it came clean, bagged and anonymous, like a packet of crisps. She placed the grit back on her tongue, the first stone in a wall.
At school I learned that if you share your chocolate with someone every day, it doesn't make them like you. It just makes them expect chocolate. Of course there's learning and learning. I still seem to end up with no chocolate and someone spreading rumours that I wet myself in Geography and had to go home. But at least now, when someone gives me chocolate, I don't feel I have to be nice to them.
We put two cans on a piece of string and stretched it tight. You said I had to pull good and hard, or you wouldn't hear me. With that distance between us, with the smell of baked beans in my nose instead of the smell of your mum's cigarettes, with the feel of you pulling away from me, I thought maybe I could say something true for once. But when I opened my mouth, you let go of your can and you laughed at the gash mine left on my chin. I have to admit, it was pretty funny.