"I go on writing so that I will always have something to read."
~Jeanette Winterson, "The Passion"

I'll hold your hand, mirror-child, you're not alone. Eyes will watch you, whilst you smile, candle-like, wavering, flickering, a sharp blue blade in the cloud-dreaming sky of mine. Dry your tears, mirror-child, I will give my words and when you believe them as your own, you will be no longer be alone.

Bury those thoughts, little mirror-child, pile on the shimmering distractions, the fleeting bobbing tail of a fleeing rabbit should not catch your eye. Ten thousand baubles, a firmament of stars blinking-scattered upon a frozen lake. You, looking up: an inky mirror of the dark ice, the stars too far away hung upon a hammered sky, slowly dancing their long, long deaths. The mistempered heavens, windowless, watch you, mirror-child, as you drowning, Ophelia-like, winter-trapped a glass away. Endlessly communing with the changeable tempest blue of the skies, forever a flat world, without depth, a glossy pane. Until springtime interrupts, and ripples trapped in the sudden cold course through water again, like fear, like cold, like goose-pebbled skin.

Heavy words, a swallowed stone and a pocketful of pebbles. Drowning by their weight, anchoring.

Embrace it, mirror-child, weave bad poetry around the grains of sand until it, pearl-like, gleams. Whisper until pain is beautiful, a play of night and shadows, bloodless carvings upon a melodramatic soul. Whisper until it is something you can love and be proud to call your own, a web of spider-lies, salty gossamer-tearstains upon a smiling face. Whisper until it knots into a string of dew-dripping diamonds in the early morning light. Wrap it up in conceits from the fairy tales and plunge it into that old world, the world I used to tell you of in language of silence and waiting. Remember my tales, mirror-child and they need never trouble themselves with such theatrics, half a mocking thought is all they can spare.

Whisper it, mirror-child. Breathe it into the muffling, stifling, suffocating softness. Drown in the sheets, a tangle of beige-brown boredom, entanglement of a lazy morning no longer pleasant. Lie and lie, one will make the other more comfortable, a bed of secrets.

Strew it with words, child, blossom upon blossom, unspoken tangles, petal-clenched fists of a bud. The requiem of myself, played upon old church organs, the weighty music choking out of the tall metal chimneys, a landscape without flesh. A grave, too soon forgotten, too often mourned and with too many words.

But it is words, mirror-child, that will make this pain immortal.

Speak to me, mirror-child, tell me myself, the story of why we are the way we are and why I no longer recognise your eyes. You've been here before, it is not a new story and wholly my own. Dream-stained memories, as shatter-colour windows glaring down on one as one walks that long, solemn walk through the stone labyrinth. The doors, dangling on rusty hinges, creaking open. The rooms, each a monument to a moment, laborious stone. But we can pretend, in the dark, under the early mist-morning sky, that we have never tread on these paths, never found these corridors and that the well-trodden grass with its mud-buried life, and these well-worn corridors with their gloomy, staring lamps are still immaculate.

And poetry, mirror-child, will aid in this light-trick, all wires and glass. There is no longer a soul here, long buried, too in love with her other soul.

But give me words, mirror-child, and tell me again that story.

Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river.
~Malagasy Proverb


Know first that rabbits are not bunnies.

Rabbits are creatures of reality, blood and bone. Born blood-coloured in litters and dying often in equally messy ways. Rabbits eat and sleep and fuck. They irritate farmers, bite small children and get made into pie. They age, grow old, become something other than what they were. They are anchored in the ever-shifting reality, fluttering-trapped by the cage of bones inside them.

Bunnies, on the other hand, inhabit that curious space of imagining, a sun-dappled-dozy dream of someone who once saw an exceptionally cute rabbit. Bunnies are made of fluff, the very cotton-candy fabric of dreams in its most raw and unprocessed form (it is why dreams are full of clouds). They need never eat nor sleep.

Only now can I tell you of this fairy tale, of a bunny who loved a rabbit, of a dream who loved reality, very much.

Once upon a time...

"You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right."
~Maya Angelou

I sat in the living room today.

It was empty but for the shadows of those who once sat in it. The clutter remains, ever-rearranging, but it melts into the furnishings. All that clutter: the paper in its myriad forms, as roleplay books, as folders, as outdated notes, as character sheets, as A4 pads, as paperback novels, but there is also the decoy remotes (to make the task of finding the real one that little bit more complicated) and offensively bright yellow-and-orange blowpipe that is routinely rediscovered every month or so, one solitary knitting needle, the infamous Legendary Couple comic books and a rather depressed-looking green beanbag, the huddling of mugs and glasses waiting to be corralled back into the sink.

So strange to have it empty of you.

A weary-shelved bookcase is in the corner, on the drooping shelves stand the uniformed D&D books, the rather repetitive regiment of the PS2 games and the colourful, if disastrous tetris-game that is someone's DVD collection. Behind the TV is the sacred shelf of the character sheets. There's an wastepaper-basket-of-plenty (like the cauldron of plenty, but less useful) in the corner. The shiny glass monument that is the CD player lives behind a barricade of CD cases, utterly cut off from the remote control.

The sofas that have a tendency to envelope and swallow their occupants. But then the long line of occupants have imprinted upon the lumpy, worn sofas their slouching and sprawling forms. They seem but empty now, possibly a bit hungry, but it is hard to tell with inanimate objects. Chequered tea towels grow on the arms of chairs, like moss.

You once said that the room has an overwhelming sense of beige – not that anything in the room itself is beige, far from that – it's only that the wild array of time-muted colours average out to a feeling of enveloping beigeness. I can't see it, though its emptiness lends itself to a sense of monotony and a tomb-like lifelessness.

The skeletal carcass of a boiler that glares down at me all like an apathetic god.

Not unlike in a tomb, the antechamber full of burial goods. The accessories to life, but not life itself, because they could not seal that away, all stowed away carefully watched by the lone slave, in case the dead may need again.

The slave, wondering if it would have been better if they had slit her throat like the horses and the dogs, would wander about the room. Measure how much space she is to share with the belongs of the dead in paces, in small ones, so that it would seem larger. She would examine each of the objects cast into the tomb and wonder when the dead will come back to claim them. More though, she would wonder about the man who owned them, imagine the life he led. She would search for the echo of his deeds amongst the splendours and the wonders of his tomb, his papers which she could not read and the implements of his livelihood.

But she would be deceiving herself. All these things are too new. As is herself, purchased the day before the funeral, far too cheaply, festooned in black and told to mourn.

She would watch the roses die, the smell of their death filling the chamber. Each of them. And wonder she would wonder if he had ever loved the blossom. How could he love something that screamed its death so?

She would count each of the links in the armour, imagining it on shoulders of not a spectral master, but a living man. For that is how he will return. She would survive on the slowly aging wine and best of the harvest, but she would be careful not to eat too much so that there would be some left for him when he returns.

She would run her finger down the each edge of the waiting sword; she will sharpen it until all blade is gone. And then she will talk to it.

Because they have one thing in common. They are both waiting.

"Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow."
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Do you know how hard it is to draw blood?

Especially at the edge of a blunt knife. At first, it's nothing but white scratches. Long, white lines crossing. You've cut nothing, but the pain still fascinates. You scar them across your legs, trails of white, as though you've just fought rosebriars, staggered through a forest of thorns.

White. That bland, almost unnatural colour of an empty page, the eternal promise of beginnings.

I could write white on my skin. The pain is slight, fleeting and the lines will be gone by morning. Like all beginnings, it is illusory. After all, there is always something before, before the beginning, just as there is always something after, after the end. You could untangle a few threads from life an call it a story, but the frayed edges will be telling of a greater tale.

You can make marks on your skin with that blunt penknife, straight red lines, if you force the blade to dig deeper. Repeatedly. At first you'd only dent the flesh, thin straight groves. Sculpt it in shadow.

Eventually you'll find red. You may have to retrace your lines to do so, the layered pain. If these words are your own, repetition shouldn't sour. Unlike the scratches, this pain will linger. The pain will take on a pattern, to feel words as an echo in your skin as you lie seeking sleep.

There is little finesse in this carving; whatever you draw there can be little detail with those simple, straight lines. But then, you aren't doing this for complications.

This isn't the dark red of blood. It's clean; it doesn't stain, doesn't clot. As neat as the corrections a teacher would make in the margins and as red. Cross the past, write it right. Those days were merely drafts, let me live it again. I owe them me. I'll feel this time, I'll open my eyes and smile with them.

Slice through that numbing fog that hung like a shroud about you; it knows red just like your skin. It will well forth, slowly, if you look for it with a blade.

It's intoxicating to feel again. Like light, it blinds as much as it illuminates.

Physical pain is simple. It comes in two colours, red and white, unlike language which flows black and blue. The so-called heart beats any number of colours and that pain, less visible, less advertised, is far more complex. It runs deeper, deeper than the blood you cannot draw with your blunt instrument.

I wonder why others bother razor blades and scalpels; the blunt little pocket knife can do so much more. I suppose beads of blood would nicely complete the pattern, but this isn't about blood. Neither is it about pain, after all, if I wanted pain I need merely place weight on my ankle, walk on those cobblestone roads. At least that's a productive sort of pain.

It's proof I can still feel.

See? It's red and white. I'm not numb anymore, I don't long for sleep or oblivion. I am here and I can feel this.

This.

"The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant."
~Salvador Dali

He will always remind me of white butterflies.

I'm not sure if it's a real memory anymore, but I remember it more clearly than those milestone events, the dinner-dance in that silver hall, the overly cold gym, the last assemblies with overlong speeches riddled with never. I was reading whilst walking up that concrete hill and from cracked, worn gutter there grew tall feathered stalks with yellow pinpoint-flowers. Flitting through those waving brushes, tickling the wind, akin to the reed the swallow stayed behind for, was a solitary butterfly with round, white wings.

It's an image, an illusion, a mirage, that his memory that always conjures. It's his hands. He has beautiful, almost delicate white hands that spoke more clearly than his voice.

The idea of him was intoxicating, distant as any celestial creature. Half a world away, he wasn't there to contradict or correct me. But then, I didn't imagine him with red roses. I thought only of his white butterfly hands and the words that would come with them, a crossing of tongues in debate and discourse, the only passion between us being for ideas rather than flesh.

I wanted words, ideas, opinions. I measure love in it, each letter a flutter of the heart. As some would cite me days and years of their love, the feelings fortified by time, I would tell you of the words I wrote.

They say we were to grow in celestial light. They emblazoned it in Latin on their crest; it was a promise of sorts, I suppose. It was why they put us in a box every night, individually wrapped. They would peer in to assure themselves we were safe before they locked shut the lid. The windows only opened a sliver, the cold night air seeped rather than swept.

I remember waiting for the moon. Sometimes you could see the scythe of it through the skylight, pale and its edges softened by cloud. Curved as a half-open eye, peering.

It was then I wove the myth of him, the ideal I strove for. I strung the scattered memories into a story, found unintended meaning in every word he said. I hung his star among the firmament and guided my craft with its light.

I know now I did not want a lover; I wanted a muse.

Those scattered memories, sown in a distant land. Should I walk up those stairs again, hand on the flaking brown and white paint of the handrail, I would see them anxiously wringing their hands. I'd see him, whom I never truly knew, cast a careless promise my way. Keep in touch. But why would I want touch? I wanted to aspire, to reach; I needed nothing of holding, of hands.

I should go back and collect them, these memories true and false, and put them in a pumpkin. Like the one I offered him so long ago.

Just a pumpkin.



All my tongue has not found words for, I have trusted a pumpkin to say for me.

"I got you something."

Don't look at me that way. I know most of your friends probably don't give you presents on a moving train, halfway to dawn, but a pumpkin is more eloquent than me in these matters. I'm sure it doesn't stumble over its words, unintentionally patronize or stare all too rudely.

I pause, reach into my bag and fish out a wooden orb, slightly smaller than your open palm. It is painted bright orange, with a stubby green stem. It would probably be quite at home on the shelves of a well-stocked make-believe supermarket, waiting for buyer with paper money and plastic coins, but I've pulled it out of childish pretence and placed in squared in this surreal moment between us. It was probably more comfortable between the plastic strawberries and the squeaking cabbage.

"It's a pumpkin," I add.

I know most would rather choose flowers; they are more reliable with their prescribed meanings, like the colourful doses on pharmacy shelves. There are books that can help you decode the components of a bouquet, pick it apart like knotty embroidery and dissect its particulars.

Flowers signpost a cliché. They call to mind the white lilies that nod their heads in a hospital room, holding vigil throughout the night, waiting for waking. They call to mind the nervous fingering of a box-trapped ring, moonlight violins and a very expensive dinner for two. Not entirely a bromide, but it takes great bravery or ignorance to label one's emotions the sort worthy of a dozen red roses.

But I'm too uncertain of what exactly I so want to say, so want you to understand. And I don't like the thought of you leafing through some handbook of floral meanings. I can't live up to the legacy of symbolism an armful of flowers would leave me. And they would never fit in my bag, bottomless as it may seem.

"You can call it Squishy."

It's anything but, though if you turn it upside down, ignore its colour and squint really hard, it somewhat resembles a jellyfish, which is.

It's also quite solid, more hardy than roses. You can drop it a lot and the washing machine would be the one worse off in an accidental wash. It's probably too light to be a reliable paperweight, but Hong Kong is hardly the place for open windows and mischievous stray breezes. It has the curious ability of making me smile, but you have a different sense of humour, so you might not find it half as amusing. The bright orange wants more attention than it deserves, a little like me I suppose.

I can't read your expression. I'm still waiting for words.

Ladies have given knights favours: a handkerchief printed with blotchy blood-like strawberries, a veil of purple gauze still dark with the shadow of her face or a shoe as delicate and golden as its owner. Other have exchanged thimbles, acorns, buttons; given each other echoes trapped in seashells, big-eyed dolls, ornaments of prickly glass; made silver-banded promises and stood a shining, singing, swinging, quadruple-fold, light-up, pop-up card on each other's desks.

I can do all that, but I want some pretence of originality. This is no Shakespearean tragedy, no Arthurian legend, no Victorian fairy tale. For as long as I can, I want to believe these words which I have made this pumpkin a herald of, unique to myself. We all discover these emotions as though no one before had ever felt the same. Some perhaps would take refuge in the odd reference to the Bard and quote his sonnets, but I want to believe myself to be alone in them.

As alone as I am now, by your side, by your silence.

I don't know what pumpkins remind you of. There's the candlelit grins on Halloween and the great feats of Thanksgiving. Both foreign traditions, as foreign as Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz and the mats woven from dried pumpkin-rind. There really isn't much else in way of lore.

You needn't look so puzzled. It don't mean anything, or rather, it only means as much as you want it to. What I haven't the words (or maybe I've simply misplaced them - your presence has that effect on me) to say, this pumpkin was supposed to express. All that I barely understand myself, you were supposed to know and know better than myself by this pumpkin.

So it is everything or anything. Or nothing, really.

It is, after all, just a pumpkin.

"A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words."
~Samuel Butler

I could simply say that I'm not very happy. They simple enough words, common enough, mundane and understood. A child could tell you whether or not they're happy. They can hold it out to you in handfuls of laughter, it squirms like the blind, pink earthworms.

Happiness, that state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy, is simple. It is the warm tangled mornings we shared in a bed that was only meant for one; it is the rhythm of your breath against my skin; it is you the hood of your coat over your eyes.

I know I'm not that. I would never see again your strange spread of toast on my plate, a brown sunflower seeded with orange baked beans. I wouldn't hear again your half-asleep goodnight tremble through your curled form, your reluctant answer to a silly name, the indecisive colour of your eyes. Never again long, lazy kisses, rambling con

Never. It's a word too often used and too often used wrongly. Gaze for me, will you, into that unformed space from now on until the end of time, the winding overgrown path untread. Not once must you see this instant mirrored. The Fates are not known for their creativity, history has a way of repeating itself, how could one say that this is utterly unique and will never again, again. High stakes for any gamble.

Why must I entangle everything I wish to say? Why must I speak in metaphors, with smoke and mirrors? Why must my reader try to glimpse what lies behind the progression of swirling scarves, the seven veils, the glittery interchange of masks?

They say there is a cult of faces in Ancient China. They can change their faces in a deadly dance; they have a demon-black face when they kill. To prepare the dying for other world's guardians, the ox-headed and the horse-faced.

Sometimes things are too much for reality, to speak about directly. We need translate it into conceits. The mask is more true than the face, or at least more fathomable, if less simple.

So we borrow from old stories and liken ourselves to the dead tragedies, the frowning masks with down-turned eyes. We give ourselves new names and tell each other that our sorrow is as great as that immortalised in fable, we add to the ancients with our own cardboard dramas, we lay our stories beside theirs. We are like them, we are as them, we are them.

Funny how the only things worth saying are those we are utterly unable to say.

Perhaps that is why I need dart at the edges, why I weave such an elaborate, incomplete conceits, caging what I wish to say in pumpkins and muddying the waters with foreign colours.

Or perhaps it is merely those literary pretensions, ever persistent. Emotion is only worthy of attention when it is coloured lilac and dances in glass slippers on mirror-water behind a sunrise of fog. After all, all sorrow is the same, the only difference is how it is expressed. All these words are but a pretence at a unique pain.

The paradox of needing to be alone in one's pain and yet hold the company of the dead.

"For the Greeks, the hidden life demanded invisible ink. They wrote an ordinary letter and in between the lines set out another letter, written in milk. The document looked innocent enough until one who knew better sprinkled coal-dust over it. What the letter had been no longer mattered; what mattered was the life flaring up undetected . . . until now."
~Jeanette Winterson

The walls don't like me much.

They are white, the colour that haunts me, stares challenges into my eyes and entangles thought. Shadow plays across them in a lurid dance as the lights dim; they are susceptible that that. They taunt me, torture me with silence until it that emptiness fills me and I have no words but the riotous patchwork of televised syllables and leftover thoughts twice-mulled, whittled down and re-shuffled until it fits into that sacred twenty two minutes. It filters through me, my gilded mind and I know nothing but for the play of light-snakes and colour-butterflies in that pretty little box.

Cut me open. Empty me of myself. Stuff me up with candyfloss words and sew me back up again with sugary thread.

As though the butterflies would ever escape. Each impaled on a drawing pin and wing-bound by sticky tape, they lie on the floor, as though swatted down by an irritated hand, by the bookcases, like dead dreams. They at least belong on the wall, stuck fast, where they could maintain the illusion, the silly pretence of soaring skyward.

These bare walls don't talk to me, but then, they shouldn't; walls were never talkative things. They tower, they taunt and most of all, they enclose.

The sweet, foreign liquid that once tasted of morning is dead on my tongue. The thing that snakes inside me in ever tightening patterns of infinity is not my own. It claims to be my heart, but I know better. The nest of leaden ants, each carrying a morsel of indecisively iridescent dust behind those glass orbs that do nothing but stare and stare elsewhere is not my brain. The barbed coil that sits in my ankle, poisoning every step I take, forcing my pace into a limp, is not mine. This paperweight, dull and heavy, designed to keep words from escaping their paper prisons, is not my tongue and the nondescript sounds it makes, I renounce them all.

This skin I inhabit, full of leftover thoughts and smooth dead pebbles, is the only thing I recognise. I know the map made by its many imperfections: the island that rests in the fold of my elbow; the scattered constellation of moles; the pale scar across my fingers; the angular scales cracked white into my skin. I know it to be mine.

My author sleeps.

It is she who first penned the line of my being, sculpted me of blood and passion, first dotted the is that would become my eyes and eventually grew into me, myself and I.

But like all authors, she is over-fond of reading her own words. She gave me my meaning and that is all there should have been. She forgot the words written white inside me, forgot my frayed and scribbled edges, forgot that half of me is authored by her other half. Or perhaps she doesn't forget and that is why she insists, dear reader, that I should be read with only one meaning.

Not here, a spark of inspiration floats, lost and lingering. It may be me, or rather, it is what first inspired her to write me. Or so I would like to think, if such is possible for one who is nothing more but a skin-sack filled with quotations divorced of their source, a half-rewritten creature whose author clings onto it still. I'm too much rewritten, that spark escaped long ago. An elusive concept that even she with all her milk words on ricepaper could not trap and her many intentions and frustrations merely chased away. And all that remains is the mess of paper, ink and glue of a prison, one much burdened with the one true reading.

She does not wish for me to be read, or rather, she wishes for no more new readings.

Perhaps it's these words, odd and oriental on my tongue. I could not shape them. I hate myself for cluttering my speech with senselessness, tripping over simple phrases. But the author is here and I must speak my part.

Perhaps that spark is not out there, not here. It is too easy to think that I am not me and the real me is elsewhere. It may still be here, lost inside this skin and the jumble of other words that share this space. This endless rewriting put to a pause by the author's presence, but it will begin again. Her reading overshadows all and I'm lost in her words, the words she placed like manna onto my tongue.

My author sleeps, her snores punctuate my words.

She does not know how I am re-cobbling her masterpiece into some new creature, rewriting myself inside out, trying to find that spark that should be holding me together. A spine of glue and edges is not enough. I am translating, rewording, recreating.

When I glance myself in a mirror, I will tell myself that that is not me, not yet. I do not need to fear that patchwork face and pebble eyes. These lines will not prevail; they will fade as old words from new books illuminate.

I was waiting to be let out, but this is no prison of dark-eyed gaolers and their jangling keys. If I ever wish for freedom, I need write my way out.

And then all there is to fear is my true face.

"The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."
~Sylvia Plath, "The Bell Jar"

There were days when all I wished to do was breathe.

I would lie loosely curled upon the still sea of the rumpled beige duvet, its motionless waves each holding its breath to give me space for mine. Shadow-gridded sunlight filters in through the dirty-streaked glass, warm and unquestioning. Dust motes dance, soaring spirals in an elaborate mating ritual that would soon bring another frosting of their kind upon my disused books.

I breathed: warm air; the familiar scent of sunlight and old sheets; the stale, still air of the room; the worn leather smell of the sheepskin rug; the open jar of butter-and-chocolate emollient; a vague saccharine whiff of the abandoned pudding on the bookshelf.

I needed nothing of the world but for this patch of window-shaped sunlight. It flooded my skin with its warmth, it had neither fingers nor arms either caress or embrace, it held me, like the sweet, soft centre of a hidden kiss, half-melted chocolate ensconced in a hand-warmed dough.

And I was silent, soundless.

I could hear the dull beat of my heart, the drumming of blood in my ear, myself breathing. But for the distant rumble of the washing machine and the angular shadows thrown onto my face, the world did not intrude into my sunlit sanctuary. Beyond the windowsill with its peeling pale paint and frowning furrows cracked into its wood, the grey concrete garden squats between wooden fences, its meagre crop of tall, feather-leafed greenery tickling the laundry, the scaly rooftops pave a mountainous field, the sky was but a corner of captive blue.

Divorced of the sky, heavy-lidded eyes saw nothing but the white cloudlike rug. Remember ancient vellum and the black words acid-scorched into it, the surviving pages, worn and weathered, the words were too much to hold. The paper still is, but were words once were, there are but long, scrawling word-shaped holes.

Some words are too much to bear, too much for the page. Try to cage then, knot them around ruled lines and tangle them to one another. But they'll slip away nonetheless through the weave of the page, leaving but so many fragile, burnt edges, jagged as the flourish of your script.

I felt time trickle by in each laboured breath, every second thudding on my skin as my heart quivered another beat.

The silence echoed throughout me; I held my mind empty as a cavern, as a mirror. I reflected by the stillness around me, like the looking-glass chained to my wall. Long has it romanced the tall bookshelf, wooing it with true images of itself. (An oft interrupted endeavour as a woman with drowned hair had the habit of seeking in the glass some lie it could not provide.) The bookshelf, the habitat of artful paper lies would have none of the mirror's honesty, instead, it steeped itself in bright bindings of the unknown falsehoods, each a promise of escape, like paper doses of anaesthetic. The glass remained steady, staring. It never saw, never knew the dull, word-riddled insides of the colour-covered books, but then, neither did the bookshelf; both were as blind as each other.

And the closed books upon the shelf remained closed.

I was drowning in silence and sunlight; it seeped into every crevice of me, filled me with warm contentment, the promise of eternal wordlessness. To renounce all words but for the carefully measured breath that I hiss forth, my sole occupation. To relinquish all thoughts but that which metes out my breath, heaves my breast to take it in and forces it forth again. To know naught but the glossy covers of the world, to see no further than my corner of my room through half-closed eyes.

I succumbed.

I simply am, and for that simplicity, I am nothing.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.
Carl Sandburg

Sometimes I love the promise of a book more than the book itself. The title, oft emblazoned too many times on too many pages before the beginning, is what seduces me into the fictional. It coveys an image in an instant. It gives a glimpse, tips the hand of the author and one must spend all one's time wondering until one's finally witness how those cards play out in the game of paper.

Titles of fantasy books all too often seem a random selection of fantastical words. Feral creatures are popular, like crows and wolves. Certain objects carry half the genre on their back, such as swords and thrones and sceptres and towers. There are favour materials, like stone and Glass and Iron. Not many seem to like steel, though. Artistic constructs like dances and requiems and games and songs are also favoured. Words that hearken to some heathen lore are not uncommon: runes, magic, sorcery and Avalon. Of colours, black and white and dark are preferred. Some numbers are better than others, such as five and seven.

And of course, dreams. It's a word I too must confess to overusing.

Pick a handful of words. Rearrange them until the sound fantastical. And then a title will stare you in the face. One could only hope you do not wish to read the book too much as it is not yet written.

Though no doubt there's a stray story out there that would happily harness it however haphazardly the fit.

I like the word glass. Perhaps it is memory of that old solitary slipper still holding sway from my fairytale days. Perhaps it is simply because it is like ice that does not melt, a cheaper version of diamond or a shard of crystallised sky in your hand. For whatever reason, I would gladly read about the Glass Raven or the Glass Throne or the voyages of the Ship of Glass.

Hold the word glass up to the light. Turn it, watch the ideas dance inside its solid black letters, like butterflies in a jamjar. Hold it one way and you'll find the translucent glass of windows, hold it another and you'll find the reflective looking glass of the Wonderland. Find in it the orbs that drip like over-heavy raindrops from the needles of winter trees, the welkin eyes of porcelain dolls, the colourfully stained shards that rest like snatches of trapped rainbow in the gaps of lacy windows.

To see behind, to see into yourself, to see into the beyond. Light plays with it a game of illusion and delusion, see how it is caught in the prickly strands.

I bought the book The Dream Merchant, when trying to escape my own life, much enticed by the idea of one who traded in the mystery and the longing of the night. A hundred pages later I'm feeling almost disillusioned. It is not that Gippart International isn't an interesting concept and the idea of dream-time, the great umaya, collective dream of mankind being a place for potential commerce fascinates, but a small part of my mind still clings onto the first glimpse of the book.

When I first saw the title, The Dream Merchant, I thought of anything but multinational corporations and teenaged associates with nametags. My mind was filled with the oriental junks sailing, gliding like enormous gulls upon a crimson sun-coloured sea. Their cargo, shimmering dreams in the form of bolt after bolt of opalescent cloth, harvested from drugged and sleeping men by a one-eyed crone with a scythe, to be meted out by beady-eyed traders in yards, sold to a steel-and-stone city that had no dreams of its own. The weave of dreams and its elaborate pattern, entangled by a sleeper who wastes away in his small corner of a great field, one enslaved by his ability to create wild landscapes of the mind.

Or these dream-tapestries being woven by Fate-like beings, who measure them out as rigidly and as strictly as the Fates do our lifetimes. I thought of the black market, trying to subvert this system dictating the dreams of the people, the grey and pastel tones they demand everyone think in. Passion is dangerous; dreams are the source of passion.

I thought of goblins and their market, the infamous traders of dreams. The bustling goblin market, where the little creatures with wrinkled skin and sly eyes traded a year of memories for an impossible wish, slices of sky for blinking jewels, lost moments for forgotten time, a lifetime of dreaming for a night with a mermaid. They'd trade the mundane for the miraculous, mystery for mystery. More gamble than trade.

I thought of dreams in jam jars, crystals, pumpkins, all carefully stowed away. I thought of them being reflected in a great looking glass that had the ability to trap them. I thought of the creature who owned this mirror, the labyrinth he lived in, built out of his vast collection. But he dwells in left behind thoughts, ones their owner has shed and grown out of. He catalogues his library, but could not make sense of these old abandoned dreams and begins his quest for new ones. He gambles and the forfeit is the death of one's soul to him, the cost of a dream.

All this I did not find. I found only the light-fingered Josh Cope and his ability to fall asleep whenever he wished. Perhaps I am asking too much.

Still, the promise of a story taunts.

"You start with an empty page, a blank canvas, a silence; and you begin to fill the void. Where once was nothing, there is now expression, a light in the darkness."
~Christopher Wallace, "The Resurrection Club"

Perhaps it is merely because I need more words to call my own that this begins. A call for more words to be strung together, however haphazardly, onto a page, to defile its pristine, virginal white with my chicken-intestine language. After all, this is not my first, but would not every watcher want the sheets to be cunningly stained, more artistry than art, such as to believe there were never words before. As every beginning must, by its name and nature, be just that, a beginning.

Ink flows, black and blue through my veins. I can trace its passage through my skin, see where it knots and frays, where it divides my living corpse into sectors, mapping this changeable landscape with meaningless lines of latitude and longitude. I can press my fingers to its dull, if erratic, beat. There is no song in my blood, no whisperings of the heart. Ink is silent until seen, and even then it speaks with a borrowed voice.

I bleed letters; they blossom through broken skin. Vowels, crouched and curled come first. The roll out, tailless and earless, often undotted and hatless, merely tiny bundles of unuttered sound. The long-limbed letters come later, not until after the small folded lines of the slippery and the slithering.

They clot, brown and almost black, into words, entwining themselves around the pale, guiding arbour of the page, climbing in a tangle of prose, flowering into flourished dots and large hooks. It scrawls itself in a slow congealing trickled across a the waiting, wrinkled vellum of my skin. A new mapping of the self, a voyage through changed lands.

And thus I feel through words. If it was not written of, it was not felt and so much has not been written of, now lost. Perhaps that is why I spent so many winter months numb and unfeeling, drowning in a wordless sea. Perhaps that is why I had been so lost, without words, between the many shelves of a labyrinthine library of blank-paged books.

Long have I lay immobile in my pale-skied world, roofed in with wood-framed white. I would look up and find a flat sky, seamlessly and endlessly clouded, with neither shadow nor light. It invites neither soaring wing nor reaching hand. It did not call to me, it did not demand the flinging of sound into its depths. Though window-framed, it seemed endless and its motionless clouds swallowed, coddled and smothered until the everything else was but a muffled sigh, all colours muted to a pastel shade seen as though through misted glass. It enveloped me in a numbing eiderdown white, pressed soft and cottonwool comfortable against my skinwas a promise that I need never bleed again.

Yet now to know, it was always nothing but a page waiting for words.

So now, to find again words, to feel.