2nd 1st Kiss

The first one was in a different lifetime ago, in a place far, far away. But it definitely happened. I still remember it to this day. Kind of, anyway. It’s more like indistinct snippets of an ancient dream. Vague. Unclear. Wispy. It did happen though. Must be at least decades ago. Maybe as many as ten. Ten decades ago. Can you imagine that? Ten decades ago? My past life, thinking about it, was perhaps more. We’re talking witchcraft here, we’re talking warlocks. Going back centuries, really, when both were innocently persecuted. And you know what, we formed a bond. That’s all I know. We formed a bond that would outweigh all the savagery of times. They gave it, we took it. Bloodthirstiness, murderousness, mercilessness...we took it as one. And it took us. The cold venom of the age stole our lives. Worse than that, it took our dignity. They killed our livestock, they burned our villages, they enslaved our children...but they could never erase the memory of our first kiss together. Witch and warlock. That was a monument itself in the wild blue yonder of the heavens. It took place upon a hill, in the sunset...and then here I was...here I was in the modern age, in the same situation, with someone special, nothing but déjà vu rippling through my soul. I certainly wasn’t a warlock, and the special person who shared my first special kiss certainly wasn’t a witch...but...but...I couldn’t shake a worse for wear suspicion that we were actually witches and warlocks, meeting again, reuniting, re-gathering and regrouping, coming together again for a second encounter in a different dimension. We were students now. Students. Young and free. Our keen minds growing. Aching for each other.

And this was something far more spectacular than the memories made of the persecution we faced. Can you imagine having been lovers, experiencing the passion between us, and then the utmost fear we encountered which brought our souls together for all eternity after we were murdered? That second kiss was electrifying as our lips touched after Art class, bringing us back to all those decades ago, recognising each other’s touch and smell and reigniting the passion we’d once shared. It awakened all our senses and made us question humanity and the evil acts which are still upon us in the modern era. We rose above those evil acts.

They say that love can drive a person insane. It certainly fuelled the war between our persecutors, and subsequently ended our lives. I guess it changed the face of the planet. However, at the same time, love has been the driving force of change for the better, giving us hope and something for us to look forward to. Marriage, a home, children’s parties. Finding each other again has taught us more about life than anything else ever could. It has taught us about how the way the world works. Our eyes are now open to just how beautiful and horrible every single person in this world is capable of being. When we are with each other once more, we find ourselves questioning peace and hatred. So much beauty and so many monstrosities...Love is perfect – the one thing in the entire universe that is entirely perfect. And being such means it must hold everything within it – both good and evil, both beauty and ugliness, both peace and war. Which we were once victims of. Love is the single power in this universe that is perfection. It is mutable, multifaceted. Love is whatever we wish it to be. Or rather, love is whatever we make it to be. Understanding love and what it allows for is arguably the most important lesson a person can learn in any lifetime. It is the one thing that every single human being in the world longs for. Love is what drives us to act. It drives us to create change, to become different people. I say different and not better, because, the truth is, love doesn't always turn us into better individuals. Were our persecutors in love with us, perhaps scared of us and what we had together as a pair, because that was something special, a fucking unbreakable bond which was not of this world? Is that why we were once destroyed? I recognise, in a sense, that even our persecutors, or rather sociopaths, wanted to be loved – even if only by themselves. Romantic love is by far the most dangerous of loves, but for this very same reason, it is the most powerful. This was a force that undeniably scared our persecutors, leaving them with a need to extinguish us. It has the ability to change a person to such an extent that afterwards, that person is often not even recognizable to him or herself. The problem with love is that it doesn't offer a definition. Sure, we experience it, but most people never come to truly understand it. We find ourselves falling deeper into ourselves as we wonder how is it possible to have such a connection between witch and warlock...student and student...and wondering is it possible to love the same one soul for all eternity? The answer is easy: The memories we made and continue to make help us to be the people we have grown to be. We wish to be no one else. We are entirely happy within ourselves.  Our history and what’s happening in this age may bring tears to our eyes from time to time, but we know that without tears every so often, even the smiles will lose their meaning. It’s all about smiles and cries. Together we can face whatever this cruel world chooses to throw at us so go on and do your best but you will never break our bond and for as long as there is air in our lungs we will protect each other and will never give in to your demands or threats. You as the evil persecutors are the weak individuals with no idea of being loved and bonded so in my opinion you are the losers in all of this.

We met up in the corridor after class, and we shared our second first kiss together. The walls melted into the sunset again, we explored each other’s bodies and souls, and we knew there were better things to come. No matter what, we were one. Always and forever. One.

 

witchlovingwarlock productions 2016 (collab)

The Mystery Of My AWOL Granny

We took our granny to the home of the elderly when she was seventy. For the next fifteen years, she sat in the same wheelchair next to the same window, gazing out over the same flowerbeds. She consumed, mainly, cups of tea. Occasionally, she would have a chocolate digestive with them. We visited every Friday, but she hardly spoke a word. I wondered if she still recognised us. The nurse said she had Parkinsons, Alzhemiers, and rapid-cycle bipolar disorder. There was nothing rapid about her, if you asked me. Her glazed-over eyes were as lifeless and watery as the tea she drank. She had become an empty old shell. They pushed her to bed at night and they pushed her back to the window in the mornings. They pushed her along the corridors as they had pushed a thousand weary souls before.

One Friday, Granny wasn't there. The wheelchair was, but she wasn't in it. And this is where, according to the policeman present, the mystery begins. I feared the worst. I feared that she had somehow fallen, or perhaps maybe jumped, through the window. It was, after all, as wide open as wide open could get. But there wasn't a body in the flowerbeds, not even an old woman shape left behind. There was nothing, but she was gone. As gone as Lord Lucan or Elvis. As gone as Houdini during a vanishing act. And this is where the sightings begin.

The first one is an account by a lollipop man working the crosswords at a local primary school. He said he saw an elderly woman in flowery pyjamas skipping across the road. He said she was both skipping and whistling at the same time. She moved, according to him, with the speed and grace of a prom queen on powerful stimulants. Like a teenage ballerina on her way to the gala, he said.

The second was a CCTV recording inside the Co-op on Wimpole Road. She was seen stealing a loaf of sliced bread and making off out of the store without bothering to queue up and pay for it. She was also spotted soon after at the local canal, sitting with her feet in the water, casually feeding the ducks. When a groundsman approached her, she pushed him in and made good her escape over a hedgerow, soaring over it like a hop skip and jumper of Olympic standards. It gets worse. A lot worse.

Within that same hour she was seen passing over a busy motorway on a bicycle with a basket on the front, like the one in E.T. This was the point where I had to sit down to fully ingest what was happening with my simple, senile granny. She pedalled over ten miles – ten miles! – to a neighbouring town, where she entered an ice-skating rink and hired a pair of size five boots. I quite clearly remembered my granny's shoe size, but there was no history to my knowledge of any ice-skating experience. Apparently, she did several laps unassisted and attracted quite an audience, leaving via a fire exit and setting off all the alarms in the process.

Her next activity was an outdoor yoga session in the park. She joined in with a community gathering, practising moderate exercise and mindfulness. The rest of the class were impressed by her fluid agility. They said that the light of the day drifted around her different postures. The way she moved, she reminded them of The Karate Kid.

Next thing she did was book herself into a daytime champagne spray party. Some bigwig chief exec was throwing a bash in a public function room. Granny couldn't resist popping in for free refreshments. Along with everyone else, she was soaked to the bone by the time she left, so she showered off at the leisure centre next door, doing a few lengths of the pool while she was in there. Backstroke, I believe, at quite an accomplished pace. Maybe she was drunk and maybe she wasn't. It's unclear how much drinking actually takes place at those spray parties. The attendant said he had to give her a verbal warning for bombing into the shallow end.

After her dip in the pool, she went for a game of bingo and won over a thousand pounds. After buying some fresh pyjamas and new slippers, she handed the remainder into a Salvation Army box. They said she had a golden soul and that the ether of the atmosphere was shifting around her as if she were some kind of spiritual messenger from another realm.

How she had not been detained by the authorities by this time was beyond me. I was hearing, but I wasn't believing. She was eighty five years old, for the love of God. Surely we couldn't be talking about the same woman. There had been a mix-up, this was a mistake, it was all an elaborate set-up. The police officer informing me of all this was a prankster, hired to play out the details of this joke. She was still here really, sat in her wheelchair somewhere else on the ward, blending in with the furniture as she had for the last fifteen years. I was the subject of a hoax. Except the policeman was real. I knew it in my heart. It was etched all over his face, deep within the lines of his puzzlement. My granny had not only disappeared from the second floor of a nursing home, but gone on a sheer bonkers rampage of unimaginable scope. And most surprising of all the utter madness, somehow, was the fact that she hadn't paid for a loaf of bread. Granny – stealing! Never mind all the otherworldly frolics, this perhaps was the hardest piece of the jigsaw to get my head around.

They never found her, alas. All she left behind was a pile of pyjamas and slippers on the precipice of a hill at the white cliffs of Dover. How she got down there remains unclear, it wouldn't surprise me if she hitch-hiked in a truck. The true mystery is if she tried swimming the English Channel or not, for what chance did an ordinary old woman have of conquering those waves? The chances were slim to none, but it was fast becoming apparent that my granny was no ordinary woman. She was a maverick, a dynamo, a freak show, a magician. As yet no body has been recovered, and there are no reports of her at Calais.

Maybe she is still swimming in the waves, and maybe, just maybe, the light of the day is still drifting around her.

© ATD 2015