Red Carpet Eyes

When he looks at me it’s like his eyes are a spotlight and I’m caught in the beam centre-stage. He looks at me not like I’m the backdrop to the scene; I’m not a faded set with peeling paint and flaking edges. I’m not a shabby stage curtain, tattered from where uncaring hands roughly tugged me to and fro. No- he looks at me like I am more.
When he stares I feel like the main event, Hollywood’s finest star. When he stares his eyes give me standing ovations, his lips shower me in rich red roses and a cacophony of cheers.
And even though he’s the only member of my audience, the only pair of eyes watching my show, I feel like the most cherished character there is. Because when he stares, he looks at me as though I’m something worth looking at.

Found. (Part One)

Crowded places had always been a refuge for me- I loved the safety of numbers, of being just one dull, expressionless face in a black and white canvas painted with dull, expressionless faces. In supermarkets, cafés, airports and bustling streets I allowed myself to be lost in a wave of people, one ripple cascading among thousands of other ripples. In crowds I was always hidden, a tiny shuffling secret, safe- that is, until she found me.

I was in my local bookstore, a chain store that was always heavily populated with quiet whispers and wide eyes roving over the many-touched spines of newly published books, when I saw her first. Lazily eying a shelf of second-hand novels I had the sudden feeling of being watched, and so I turned. 

And there she was.

Her every feature was as starkly similar as the last time I saw her, as if she had been frozen in a picture frame until this very moment. But now the frame had shattered, the glass had exploded around the room- I could feel the crashing sound ricocheting in my head, could feel the blood on my hands from the jagged glassy edges. The girl had escaped from the still photograph, and my trouble was only just beginning. 

Writer’s Block

I can see the scenarios in front of me
Like shots from a movie scene,
The anger, the laughter, the tears
All accompanied by only silence-
I can’t hear the words to tell the story,
And this tale is but a blank canvas
I, the artist, without paint.
Images swirl and fall together
In no order, a jumbled kaleidoscope
Of nonsensical stories,
A twisted mirage of bleak nothings.
I see the end, the final kiss,
The last few moments of a perfect scene-
But the main girl, she’s crying
And the boy, he has no words
This wasn’t the ending we all pictured…
If only I could find the words
To change it.