‘Has he said something to you?’ ‘Not specifically. Not that. But when he talks about you, especially when he talks about what you went through during the war, it’s like he’s bursting with love. He adores you.’ - Circle Of Flight (The Ellie Chronicles), John Marsden

Just a selection of my somewhat eclectic collection!

Praise the LORD, O my soul! While I live I will praise the LORD; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

The last night Fi and I watched a video. Not a rented one, just Grease that I’d taped off TV ages ago. Fi sat on the floor. I was behind her, doing her hair, Gavin was sound asleep. Sandy, the Olivia Newton-John character in the movie, reminded me a bit of Fi. I’d never have said that to her though. She hated people saying she was ‘sweet’ or ‘innocent’. But knowing she was leaving the next morning was getting to me. When Sandy sang ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’ I was struggling not to cry. Not that I was hopelessly devoted to Fi, but I felt hopelessly shattered by all the stuff that had happened, and hopelessly lonely at the thought of her going back to the city. And then ‘Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee’ started and we were suddenly doing a dance number in front of the TV, and even though we hadn’t done anything like that for more than a year we synchronised perfectly. We didn’t need a choreographer. Our friendship was our choreographer.

The enormity of what had happened hit me at last. Sitting there on the corridor floor in the house where my mother died, I howled for my mother and father, howled like a dog, gasping for air between the howls. At the same time crazy torn-up pictures of our lives seemed to blow down the corridor towards me, as though someone had literally pulled out thousands of photos from the family albums and confettied them, so that all I saw were my mother’s gloves tied to her stocks when we were waiting to go skiing, my father’s moustache when he grew one for a few months, the scar on my mother’s wrist that she wouldn’t talk about –and now I would never know its origin and I would never see it again – her amused expression when my Stratton grandmother commented on the new curtains: ‘Do you think this style will last?’ The little black dress my mother wore to the opening of the grandstand at the racecourse, my father’s pencil stub writing down the golf scores, his laugh, her fine fingers, his grunts when he was absorbed in a job and I was asking questions, her big brown nipples that she didn’t like but I loved, his long soft penis and its curious head, her pubic hair so dark and mysterious, his pubic hair so thick and curly, him planting a kiss on the new tractor while I, at the age of eight, took a photo, her laughing and saying, ‘So you’d like me better if I had four wheels and a power take-off?’, him saying, ‘I’ll show you a power take-off,’ and grabbing her and them kissing kissing kissing, passionately, as I ran around them laughing and squealing and grabbing at them, the two of them kissing, hugging, and the love between them, the love the love, always the love, the wild beautiful love that somehow survived the fights and the stresses and strains and worst of all the monotony of everyday life and I understood then what it means for a human life to end prematurely and arbitrarily, how each human being is an accumulation of wonderful and unique details, and in destroying a human being you destroy ‘all the thousand million memories’ as well as the bent little finger on his left hand and the stubble on her legs and the smile and the grimace and the frown and the way they use a spatula and the way they chop an onion at arm’s length or place the jumper leads on the car battery or hold a baby at the school fete while the mother has a go at the ‘Putt for Prizes’. ‘Does anyone really appreciate life while they have it?’

Or was I just doomed from the start?

tagging: Just like @twtwb anyone who happens to see this can join, we want this fandom to grow!

Kroniki Ellie: Wojna się skończyła, walka wciąż trwa - John Marsden