I was once very good at telling lies before I stopped
and realised it was a type of emotional cancer.
Even today, I think I live a duplicitous life, playing
roles, being good at one thing and trying to be good at another. Can I really
call myself a writer or am just pretending? Some of the dead voices start
echoing back: ‘you’re wasting your time… you’re never be a writer!'
As you can hear, low aspiration in my past was a
virtue.
On the road down to the river is a sign that says: No
Entry. That’s the sort of road I like to go down. There are always two horses
on the other side of the water and some long carriageway shuffling cars along.
If you sit on a bench you can meet a man with enormous feet and he can tell
you:
‘See the world, don’t waste your time being in one
place. I have been everywhere and seen everything.’
That was good advice back then and so I’ve started
travelling.
But it is hard this journey. I had to decide on a
destination and found a story from my family which meant I might end up at
Fiction Point. I am not sure if it is real or imagined. It seems real enough on
a map, the middle of nowhere across the vast tracts of land in North America,
population 438.
Migration and invitation, some of them headed out for
a better life; stoke the fires, produce a brood, farm the land. Until things
went wrong. No one said anything when they came back.
I think reality caught up with the lies because you
can’t rid yourself of the past. Starting out with nothing, frontier life, less
rules and law than there had ever been.
The dirt gets in the teeth, the sand drifts north then
south, the sun is hot, and the cold is worse; the pots are fired, the land is
broke, the money stretched until the money runs out. Old habits die hard in the
harsh life and brawls in bars mean somebody is bound to get hurt. Perhaps it
was their own fault, but murder, manslaughter all adds to one thing: it’s time
to get out.
I don’t think this is what the man with enormous feet
meant when he said you should travel the world. Above, they had made a mistake;
they had only made it to one destination. But I think I am going to go there. I
have imagined that I will look in the register of births and deaths and see
something which intrigues me because I am a writer. I will be invited to stay
at someone’s house, be fed and watered and sleep the night. In the morning I
will notice something strange. I don’t know what it is. There is a young girl
on a swing, and she is swinging like crazy, back and forth, back and forth,
swinging in the chill of the morning.
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