I'm having trouble linking them here, but one is a colorful photo of a butterfly, while the other is a black and white photo of a gate surrounded by skeletal trees. Quite the juxtaposition!
I sort of floundered a bit with this, not really sure where to start or where to go, so this is a bit all over the place. Oh well! This isn't about writing gold every time, it's about pushing myself to write even when I don't necessarily feel anything pressing out of my brain trying to get through my fingertips and into the world.
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There's one of those houses in every town - ramshackle, unloved, unkempt. A fence that's nearly falling down, a gate that's rusted shut, a footpath that's completely hidden underneath a forest of weeds that leads to a door that hasn't been answered in living memory. If you live in a town with a lot of teenagers, the glass that was once painstakingly installed, usually in some sort of intricate design, has been knocked out by thrown pebbles. There's always a ghost story, some sort of legend, that's passed on from older kids to younger ones. There's always a rite of passage that comes from sneaking through the gaps in the fence and tiptoeing up to the door and touching the soggy wood. More adventurous kids will try and stay the night, curled up fearfully in a sleeping bag that gets pulled over the head in order to keep out the sound of the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls and the crevices in the windows.
I grew up in cities, where abandoned houses are knocked over to make way for high rise apartments. But when I was young I would go visit my grandparents every summer, spending a month running around their paddocks, trailing after my older cousins as they did useful things like get the tractor ready for harvesting or loading up pesticide on the back of the fourwheeler. When they'd head out to the farthest fields to work, I'd wander off on my own down the empty streets of the town. It was always a heady experience, being on my own like that - When a grand total of 132 people live in a town, there's no worry that a ten year old might get snatched off the streets if she's left alone. So visiting my grandparents, I had a modicum of independence, and would spend hours away from their musty house finding secret hiding places in the fields. One day, I found a nearly overgrown dirt road, and followed it. It lead me away from town, from the houses which huddled together and the great flat plains, and down into a valley that was shadowed by large trees. Ahead of me on the road was an old wrought iron fence, with intricate swirls to the design. At the height of summer, when the earth was dry but the grass should still have been green, everything beyond that gate was dead.
Of course, I didn't know that that was a sign for concern. Like I said, I grew up in the city. As far as I knew, plants were plants and they grew how they wanted. If these ones wanted to be dead, well, maybe they were just tired.
The gate wasn't fastened, which to a ten year old is as good as an invitation, and I pushed it open. The bright sunlight beating down scared away any fear I might have possibly felt, chased away any shadows that might have been forming in the corner of my mind, and I stopped only long enough to take a juice box out of my backpack - orange, warm but still delicious. I was careful to tuck the empty carton in the plastic bag that my Grandmother had given me just for that purpose, in that way that little kids who have had the importance of not littering approach keeping track of all their trash.
Finally, I stepped through the gate.
I may not have been afraid, but I knew that taking that actual step through the gate was a big deal. There was something about that place, and that gate at the end of an abandoned road which made me feel like the world was holding its breath.
I wish that I could say that I followed that road to its end, that I found a ramshackle house that I spent the afternoon in, finding treasures left behind by the people who used to live there. I wish that I could say that I carefully pried a shard of blue glass from where it still sat in a window frame and wrapped it in leaves to stop it from shattering my bag. I wish that I could say that I fell and skinned my knee when a rotting floorboard gave out, and that my Grandmother scolded me while pressing a bandaid to it.
But I can't.
What I can say is that I was found in the middle of an empty road, a day later, fast asleep. I didn't wake up no matter how hard they shook me, and I spent the next week in a coma in a hospital.
When I woke up I couldn't tell anyone what happened. They didn't believe me about the road that snaked through the fields (that's just a waste of good land, my grandfather said gruffly, no one would be so foolish out here), and they didn't believe me about the fancy gate.
They wrote it off as an adventure had by a city girl out in the country on her own for the first time, a city girl with a strong imagination who let herself get lost and confused by the sun.
I was restless when they let me out of the hospital. Something was different about me, I felt, but I was watched all the time now. My mother had pitched a fit over the phone when she'd learned I was hospitalized, so my cousins traded shifts of watching over me.
Then, one morning over breakfast, it happened.
The thing that made me realize that that gate to nowhere had changed me completely.
I was glaring at a half of grapefruit, wishing for some sugar to sprinkle over its top, when an ugly moth landed. Disgusted, I reached out to wave it away, but as soon as I got close that strange restless feeling that had been keeping me irritated ever since I was released from the hospital seemed to thicken and gather in the palm of my hand, and then leap out of my hand and into the moth.
With an audible crackle, the ugly brown moth was suddenly a butterfly, its original brown flecked with the orange of the grapefruit it still sat on. It flapped its wings once, twice, almost experimentally, before it fluttered away.
Since then, anything living that I come close to I change. My cousin changed next, from a gangly 19 year old with hair like straw and elbows like doorknobs into a stunning beauty worthy of being on the cover of Vogue. That knocked me back out for a day.
I don't know why it happens, or how, but there's a crackling of the restless energy, and I feel relieved for a short time afterwards.
Except it's tiring, too, I think it uses up my life energy. And I'm dieing from it, slowly. Think about it - where on this planet can you go where there isn't something alive? My life energy is being drained out of me as I move through this world, leaving changes that I can't control behind me. The more color and energy and vibrancy I push out of myself, the more I'm left behind, slow and weary and turning black and white and soon dead.
Sometimes I wonder if it's even me in charge anymore. I don't feel like it - I feel like there's something in me, something that's taking my life and channeling it out of me. Something that lurks behind my eyes and sees the world as it is, and wants it to be something else. To strike out all the things that could be beautiful in their own, unique ways, and homogenising them by conforming to classical standards of beauty.
So the moral of the story, you ask? Well that's easy.
Stay in the city. Don't go exploring. Don't go visit that interestingly haunted house at the edge of town. Don't open that beguilingly unlocked gate.
You don't know what will come through it.
