Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

For the last 7 or 8 months, I’ve participated in a virtual writing group, which I came across on Instagram (there is some benefit to that rather charged space). I joined while I was still on on my paid ‘sabbatical’ (what else do you call it?), which let me admit, has made the creative writing space just a pleasure, and a massive privilege. Imagine just being able to do something you love just because it fulfils you? The page host offers up prompts daily/weekly from which anybody can simply take something from and create: prose, poetry, sketch, essay- all with no strings attached. She also collates the various offerings once a season and more recently was so happy with the results that she decided to publish the pages in actual magazine form. I was able to submit 2 pieces for the autumn edition, one of them I had originally put on Instagram and you would have seen last week. The other piece was longer; a story, and it’s cute and personal and I’m taking the opportunity to share here with you all. I wrote it one day after taking an alternate walk to my work, and as always on that road, I tend to stop and observe the rooftop painting that stares down at me as if it’s stepped out of a Gatsby novel. Enjoy.

The window creaks open under her skeletal blue-white hand as she stretches to open it from the expanse of her unmade bed that takes up almost all of the floor space in her tiny eaved bedsit.

From the vantage point of her studio apartment, she has a perfectly clear view of dozens of tiled French rooftops, pokey chimney tops and several top-floor windows, some of which are a much desired oculus, high above the gothic framed doorways, 5 floors below.

Dozens of small loft windows stare back at her as a late summer breeze wafts through the open window. She pulls her hand back, allows it to flop onto her chest and sighs deeply.

29 days have passed since she had last left her studio. An entire summer (albeit a cooler one) has migrated into autumn and her skin is as pale as it was 3 months before.

“Who does this to themselves?”- asked so many many times when she answers her mothers frequent video calls. “Why aren’t you travelling? Why not take a walk? Put some clothes on and get some sun”.

She would bet her mother probably thought she was a vacant, limp-haired, underfed waif at the frequency she repeated herself.

Okay, maybe in this instance she was feeling a little limp-haired, and her stomach was indeed sunken as she lay spread-eagled on her bed. But she had spent a consuming amount of time at her computer over the previous forty eight hours: very nearly, she had come to finish her manuscript but the fridge full of delivered vegetables had remained in there after the neighbour had dropped them at her door 2 days prior.

It had been with an emotional fervour last month that she had opened her computer and beat a staccato pattern onto the keyboard, an unfamiliar therapeutic relief washed over her as the words spilled over. Always prone to occasions where life would climb on top of her ability to deal with everything, the recent crash had not been remedied by long canal-side runs. Nor had her yoga sessions, not the coffee mornings with her bestie, neither the series of dinner parties she had held in her studio.

When her neighbour had eventually pleaded for her to change the playlist from loud rock to something a little less aggressive, she tossed and turned in her bed for 2 nights before she had realised the words she was feeling were all tumbling around in her mind; they were not disappearing as she pounded the cobbled streets. She were not being dropped into her mixing bowls as she sifted flour and sugar for breakfast pancakes. And neither could she verbalise them to her friends when they came for dinner.

Instead they had rattled around, secreting themselves into crevices she thought she had managed to fill up years before.

Finally, as the millions of letters and words that seemed to float about the space that she existed in, had begun to morph, she sat cross-legged on her enormous bed with her laptop resting on her knees. The words flew, they danced, they twisted, turned and whirled their way through streams of golden summer light and listless summer energy to her fingertips onto her keyboard.

Her words has described a character of a cosseted childhood with an obscure need to fit in and be accepted, yet how often she felt like she was standing on the outside looking in. She wrote of her characters decisions to take a lonely path and how she had filled that road up with beauty, and love and warmth while still subjecting herself to sordid unsavoury underbelly people who also brought a richness to her life.

From her studio window, she had watched as the sun shortened its circuit, sinking down just a little earlier every evening.

Every evening as she set aside time to eat and step away from the pages of a story she was filling, she had seen the circles of a passed era advert that were painted high on the bricked building opposite, the circles resembling glasses, and that image transported her to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, an iconic classic novel set in a time and place far away, and yet it challenged her to continue at her keyboard.

She had kept to herself for a month, told her friends she was travelling, but when her mom video called her from 10 000 kilometres away, she always took the call, keeping her travails to herself, enduring the nagging because she she knew that if she couldn’t finish her manuscript, she would have no one disappointed in her.

Finally as the full moon had risen in the night sky, turning from a sunset gold into a ghostlike white above the chimney tops, she felt the final pieces falling into their spaces. She had collapsed on her pillows as the sun rose, as delivery trucks clattered over the cobbled french city streets and the morning bakery smells crept through the narrow roads.

As she lay there, her hand on her concave belly, she felt her pulse beating. She indeed was alive and well and today she would wash her hair, dress in a crisp linen dress with new espadrilles on her feet. She would leave her studio for the café near the canal, and video call her mum with a coffee and Venetian pastry in hand. Her mum would smile, grateful that her child had done what she asked.