Spurobox

A handy, all-purpose kit for the emotional upheavals and small psychic repairs that life requires.

New Novel: THAW - Try Out a Page and See What You Think

Ruth's diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. She has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free.

Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.

*

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.

Continue reading tomorrow here...

"Wermulff" is too great a word not to write a story about it some time!

Choosing the Way - a quote by Bradbury

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance. Ray Bradbury

Poem: Brahma by Ralph Waldo Emerson

My husband's taking a Comparative Mythology class and preparing a project on Indian Mythology. Discussion of the various gods popped this poem back into my head. I chose it to memorize and recite to my American Literature Class when I was 16. Even then, I had an interest in spiritual search.

Now it reminds me of the chants we learned in yoga teacher training, and also of walking below towering redwoods in our favorite stand of trees, where the nature center has posted an Emerson quote. (Well, actually it reminds me of everything, based on its message!)

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,

Shadow and sunlight are the same,

The vanished gods to me appear,

And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

1856 [1857]

Photo credit to blog.discovermagazine.com

Today

Today, I am as lonely as a flower made
of crystal, stem pulled thin and taut
with an aching sharp precision
like iced steel, like frozen light
one fine thin beam that
nods from my head
to the world

My heart as full of fear as a beehive
abuzz with mechanical bees
Oblivious to sun, to air, to wind
they sweep on, down and away
from the tremulous, ever-vibrating hive
where nothing ever stops, where there
is no pause, and seeking only
to feed their insatiable hungers

Come to rest on my lovely, cold, glass
budhead, tempting, glittering
useless and unyielding to their
alloyed thrusts

Impermeable

Check Out

First she notices the nice shape of his ass, clad in carefully distressed denim, and promising agility and muscle, something worth grabbing onto.

He is standing with a man of his age at the counter, paying, and she wonders as she often does when seeing two attractive men together whether they are a gay couple. Hard to tell. They are laughing with each other, casual, but they could be simply friends. In which case, they would be horrified that the cute woman walking by thought they were gay.

As she passes, a tantilizing whiff of cologne pivots her head towards him. His driver's license is tucked into his wallet upside down. Careless or deliberately private? she debates.

There's so much she'll never find out about him. She pushes through the door and out onto the street, him never the wiser, and these words the only aspect of him that she will retain.