These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination... Rabindranath Tagore

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
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On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--from Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Boxing Day



For four years my father drove me on Boxing Day
to spend time with my mother
who lived on her own
in a small bungalow facing the sea.


my mother was an annual routine
I grudgingly endured

I made my first journey when I was thirteen...

my mother was a living ghost
being but scarcely living
It always felt as if there was something separating her from life itself and even perhaps from herself.
She was my duty
my suffrance
my scheduled
my automatic withdrawal from
my current reality


I made the last one when I was seventeen.


NOTE
'Boxing Day' is one of  David Park's 13 stories in 'Gods and Angels' (2016)
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