Those Creative Types

The gravel crunched underfoot. A twig cracked, but didn’t break. She stopped, turned and went back. Stomping on the twig hard, she hammered and ground the base of her shoe into it until it splintered in the middle and finally came asunder, not snapping so much as falling apart at the seams. Panting a little, she twitched the hair that had come loose from her workday pony-tail and moved on up the short pathway to the house.

She held her breath and opened the door, but all she noticed was, how dusty, how stuffy. Motes of fluff floated past in prosaic patterns of grey light, filtered through the grime of winter waiting for the spring rain to wash it off the windows. It was too soon to have come back, but she hadn’t known where else to begin.

Begin, she thought. A strange word to use, given the context.

Thump. She let her bags drop, making a satisfying sound of weight hitting earth. She bustled inside, making noise in the kitchen of the one room cabin. It was larger than it looked from outside; outside it was dwarfed by the forest, the scraggly trees moving steadily, secretively closer to the house, as if they had known all along how much time she really had here. Five years ago, when she had first bought it, she had thought luxuriously of the countless seasons she would have to return again and again to her little sanctuary. She would pick her way through the shadows and light cast by the trees’ welcoming, waving branches. She would make cups of tea and rest them on her knee, listening to the sound just sideways of the silence and the wind rustling the leaves. She would write. She would be at peace.

The salt and pepper shakers were on the dining table. She stared at them, suspicion crackling the wool of her jumper. It wasn’t like her to leave them on the table. She had a thing about clear, wooden surfaces, liking to be welcomed by blankness each time she re-entered the cabin, as if she could start afresh simply by putting things away and closing the door.

There were no nooks and crannies to check in for intruders but she rummaged under the double bed in the corner of the cabin anyway, thinking of axes and isolation. Her hand touched something soft and squishy and alarm electrified her skin, switching all her senses to on. She yanked hard and fell backwards when the thing came out in an easy tumble of cotton and plastic. The winter doonah, packed away until her next visit. Her penchant for emptiness had included the bed.

She stumbled upright, hands trembling a little. Doing an about face, she crossed the room to the table and leaned against it, breathing slowly and self-consciously the way the doctor had taught her. Her legs jittered against the fleecy insides of her tracksuit bottoms. She sank into one of the dining table chairs and rested her head on the tabletop, grateful to the wood for being so unmoved by her temporary loss of control.

The room was getting gradually darker. She sat bolt upright. This might be it.

She ran outside and up the short incline behind the house to a small clearing where she would have a view of the sun setting over the forest. Holding her side and panting, she stood, staring firmly at the ground. Breathe, she thought. Don’t look yet. Don’t think of anything. Act natural, just act natural.

She looked up. The sky was awash with colour. Pinks softened into purples which receded into the darkening blue above. Tiny pricks of light appeared against the indigo backdrop, stars that had been there the whole time but were only now visible to her human eye, gazing up from below. Nothing. She lowered her eyes and saw trees, undulating in a slow, romantic dance with the breath of heaven. It was beautiful. Still she felt nothing.

She waited a moment or two, but knew it was not coming. It’s because my mind is too switched on, she reasoned. Fumbling down the track back to the house, the wind crooning to itself all around her, she stopped for a moment. Closing her eyes, she emptied her mind and let her hands float over the currents of air. If she became weightless they would lift her up, carry her as a friend on their moonlit tryst with god.

She opened her eyes. She didn’t want to be weightless.

Back in the house she decided to make a list. It was stupid, she thought, trying to find meaning in poetic moments; the eidetic imagery of the art she loved was not really her way of getting in touch with whatever it was that was going to make her situation alright, even explainable. She flicked on the corner lamps, filling the room with a hazy, yellow glow. A hot cup of tea with a bit of milk, just the way she liked it. She settled down at the table, pen in hand.

Number one. Well, there was that guy she had liked. Not liked so much, really, as thought, he has potential. He was tall. She liked them tall. He worked as a graphic designer, evidence of a creative streak. That was important to her. That could take it over the line.

She tapped the end of the pen against her upper lip. More.

Number two. There was always her family. But the whole point of life was going forwards, not backwards. She had tried and tested every corner, every sandbagged wall. There was nothing for her there.

Number three. She crossed and uncrossed her ankles. If she was going to do this properly, she had to put down everything. Give it all a proper go.

My work. She waited for inspiration, staring at the tabletop. A smile edged from the left side of her mouth to the right. This exact pose; the exact swoop and dip of the grain of the table’s wood had been worn out by her eyes over the last five summers, doing exactly what she was doing now: begging whatever was about to come from her pen to make her whole, make her entire life worthwhile.

She stood and stretched, feeling her muscles collide and unfold. She was so ridiculously healthy at the moment: ruddy with it, guiltily replete with it, like a miser hoarding his treasures who could do nothing about the hurricane headed right for his door.

Dammit. She slammed her hand hard on to the table, making it shudder. She did it again, gradually forgetting the risk to it or her hands. She didn’t care if it hurt. Bang. She didn’t care if the table broke. Bang. Bang.

Her voice broke out of her. It sounded repellent to her ears, a scared schoolgirl’s voice who had never let go of anything. She had never sung at the top of her lungs in the middle of a crowded room; she had never slammed the door in the face of someone she hated; she had never had sex with a man she loved and really, truly meant it. The one time she had been in love, and he hadn’t said yes.

She could be as reckless as she liked now. Crawling on to the bed, she let snot and dribble smear on the clean, white pillow case. She screamed out again and bashed the mattress with her fists and kicked at it with her feet a few more times, for good measure, wanting to make sure she didn’t hold anything back.

There was the sound of the wind again, audible once she had stopped jerking amongst the messed up sheets. Her very first first summer in the cabin, she had ain on the same bed and, hearing the wind and thought, It’s so peaceful, I could listen to it for hours. Now she wanted it to shut up so she could let silence in, pure, unadulterated reality, the emptiness and the peril of living so close to death the way that humans do.

She had thought that she would know what the final things would be. She would have a place she wanted to see; she would have things to say to her mother; she would want to see her father one more time and feel a miraculous honesty between them that had been waiting for just this time to emerge, like a tulip opening its heads overnight when everyone had thought it had died in an early frost. Most of all, she had always simply assumed that she would have someone to tell, urgently and happily, that she loved them.

Standing now, she swayed a little from side to side, not the way the trees did out of a hunger to be closer to their brethren, but from bone weariness. She was tireder than she looked. It was only a matter of time before it showed.

She went back to the table and picked up the list. The guy she might have liked. Her family. Her work.

Crumpling it one hand, she thought wonderingly, this is it. This was the moment she had been waiting for. She saw the doonah in its plastic bag; she saw the table shifted slightly from its usual place. The moment stretched into the next and the next, but she could still see everything where it was.

She turned off the lights and picked up the bags from where she had dropped them in the doorway, not bothering about the dirty pillow, or the salt and pepper shakers. Dumping her gear, she slammed the boot shut and put the key in the car door. She knew at least one thing: right now, right at this moment, was not the time to be alone. It was a small thing to know and she wasn’t sure how far it would get her, but it was somewhere to begin. She turned the car around and headed back towards the city.