fragments and smithereens

I don’t know what I’m writing. I don’t know what I want to say. Just that I want to write.
So I’ve made myself, really forced myself to sit down here and get something 'on paper'.

I have a million passing thoughts in a day that I feel I must write down, but I let them do just that, pass.

It’s such a hassle to get to the sitting down in front of the pc stage in the wreck of a room at the moment that I manage to avoid myself.

I thought of something earlier, but couldn’t bear to start clearing things away.
Moving the dustbin, taking all my clothes of the chair... I decided to look for what is currently passing (neglectedly) for my diary, an A5 black moleskine, but after
I rummaged for a while in the likely places (near the tops of piles mostly) I gave up.

My desk’s not especially bad, only two inches or so deep in papers and beads and 'things', but around the edges is getting terrible.

Piles of books, the borrowed granny shopping trolley that I have been using to ferry materials up to the playcentre (the idea is that it saves my back, but in actuality I think all I’m doing is making my wrist worst and twisting my back and/or hips oddly as I trundle it along, up and down kerbs and broken paving)

Things I brought away from Uni at the end of term, files, papers, more books,
Things I brought away from Uni after the fire, damp smoky stained, bewildered, displaced

Clothes on the way in; cast offs and acquisitions.
Clothes on the way out; if I could only come to terms with the fact that I really am never ever fitting into those jeans again. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve been what is according to my thick doctor ‘ a healthy weight’ and it’s going to take some serious getting used to. My tiny mini skirts? Never again my Atomic k888s? No more, alas, and the factory is gone forever so I can’t even get a size up. My cute little dungaree dress? Obscene.
In fact my wardrobe needs a serious overhaul; I’m altogether different person, mentally and physically since I could get away with baggy blacks and a push-up bra (nothing like a bit of light engineering to set off an ensemble, eh?) Having said that I don’t want to be Miss B either, long wools skirts and shapeless grey items are, well, um… to the look I aspire to?

It’s hard to do this clearing because I’m not sure what my criteria are. Who am I? What outfits do I need? What books do I need to hand? What tools shall I keep at the top of the box? How to order my cd’s when I don’t know what I like?

I’m listening to the same seven Audioslave tracks on repeat… I can’t quite explain what they do for me, I can’t even understand two thirds of the lyrics… well maybe if I really listen I under stand a lot more than that, but I’m not sure how much ‘it’ has to do with the lyrics, his voice reaches me here in this strange grey inbetweeny place I’ve taken up residence, and moves me. To what? Oh I don’t know… but away from the edge of despair...

I just stare at my walls three pages deep, or more in places, mementos of what feels like a past life. A life I’ve been meaning to glue down for a long time, into a book, full of tickets post it notes, pieces of serviette, business cards, warning stickers, labels, gift tags, teabag tabs, beads, cd covers, lyrics, shopping lists, receipts, phone numbers, cartoons, newspaper cutting, photos, match books, drawings, pieces of ribbon and string, badges, invitations, bills, invoices, reflectors, decals, iron on patches, buttons, a jelly baby, a rubber chicken, stamps, a dried orchid, a sweetie, a moomin, a token, an address….

Smithereens I call the stuff sometimes, I have a jar of it at Uni, and I think it’s after a poem… I can’t remember whose it is, but someone collects fragments of life, of smithereens… and I know how that is…. Every little scrap of paper, every lost object sparks my memory, brings rushing to me the smells and emotions of times past and moments half forgotten….

I wonder if I do it to tie me down?