#thisness

Brain Curds are lightly edited flash fiction - practically first drafts - posted daily (haven't missed one yet!) and sometimes written with the express intention of being terrible… but, you know, in an endearing way. Please like and reblog if you enjoy - the notes keep me going!

Anne and Wendy sat on opposite ends of the couch, silent. Wendy’s mascara ran down her cheeks, still wet, but she was no longer crying. Anne’s expression was entirely blank.

“I can leave, if you’d like me to,” Anne said quietly, gently, like her voice was to cradle an injured bird.

Wendy swallowed and choked a little on nothing. “I don’t… I don’t know.”

Anne sighed and went back to sitting quietly. The wind blew through the trees outside, able to be faintly heard through the cracked-open window on the other wall. Sun poured through, past the waving curtain, and made a puddle of light on the carpet. This was it, their last sunset. She knew the day was coming, she’d known for months that it was inevitable, and she had accepted that.

But Wendy never wanted to believe it. She wanted to believe she could be a better partner to Anne, that she was becoming that person whom Anne needed her to be. And for a while, she fooled herself. Until today.

The refrigerator’s compressor clicked on and the hum reverberated about the walls. Wendy thought about all the times they’d cooked dinner together and realized how long it had been since they took turns stirring risotto or raced each other to grate the most cheese. It was so long ago, now, years ago. Where did those times go? Why did neither of them notice?

I spoke with an older woman who was isolated from her own humanity and society as a result of being institutionalised in a childrens’ home of the 1950s/60s. She felt alienated from herself and from others.  I asked her who she was, who she considered her self to be.  She gave a lengthy answer.

Throughout her life she would holiday on the coast and sneak into hotels she was not staying at so that she could access their dance floors.  On the dance floor her lack of socialisation became a strength because she felt no inhibition about being the first to dance.  Indeed, she even felt as though she were giving something to the other people by providing license for them to dance. However the reason she went on these holidays was not for other people.  She went because she felt that when dancing she was herself.

Backalong, in the days before the internet really took off, I learned a badly abbreviated version of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and tried to use it to banish a spirit.  The ritual absolutely failed.  However I spontaneously performed a t’ai chi movement and the spirit was repelled.  At the time, I didn’t know the specific t’ai chi movement was a block/attack.  I had been taught the movement as part of the form without explanation.  I was fortunate that worked.

(That is a fairly good example of how innocence can be both dangerous and protective.)

Alkistis Dimech describes dance as one way to break down the barriers between self and space.  In dance one listens to space and interacts with it, not merely “overwriting the space one is in”.  A thing you interact with is a thing you can shape as well as a thing that shapes you.  Interestingly, she mentions Merleau-Ponty and his idea of chiasm, which one could argue is broadly analogous to embodied cognition and affordances - Seamus Heaney’s ‘heft’.