The Broken Writer

My mantra is not strong enough to fix this tumbling loop of broken down dreams. What was it I said, in the beginning? “The writer gives life to a story, the reader keeps it alive.”

Dear reader. Thank you for all that you have done, but I am a raging mess of emotion, numb and exhausted being smashed against life’s sharp edges. Its whirlpools and precipices flaying my creativity. I struggle to breathe, to find reason to claw my way back to the surface.

I need to take a break from writing. I am not well or skilled enough to juggle, stark reality with a dream as precious as Unbound Boxes Limping Gods. The writer is too exhausted to breathe life into these stories. I feel sorrow and remorse, but mostly want to sleep.

I will wake up one day, after the maelstrom has spat me out. I’ll look up and see a blurry angel, my muse, Alexand Merek. And just as she had done, when I was seventeen years old, she’ll whisper. “Come with me, sweetie.” I’ll take her hand and reply. “But you’re not real!” And she’ll say. “Of course I’m real. Do I look made up to you?”

Unbound Boxes Limping Gods will return after a break on Wednesday 1st September 2021 (Last issue Wednesday 23rd June) Please keep the stories alive by reading past issues. (Issue 1) or if you would like a challenge (Chronological stories) The broken writer can’t give life to a story, but the faithful reader can keep blowing on the ember, whilst she sleeps.

In The Beginning – Revisited

Just under twenty four years ago, I was 17 years old. I was taking a walk in a park called Borelli’s in Farnham, escaping from a theatre studied class, that I really didn’t want to take part in. I sat on a bench and blocked out the noise of the traffic, from a nearby road, put on my head phones and listened to Cyndi Lauper’s “The World Is Stone.”

Sam and me

There was a river nearby, and a bridge. It was Autumn, but still hot enough to pass as summer. In my left ear, instead of the cars, I heard a woman talking to me. I didn’t know her name, and couldn’t see her. There was something different about her. She understood why I’d walked out of that classroom. She told me she wanted to take me with her to a place far away from my own world. Her name was Alexand Merek. I consider her my fictional child. She was in a way, born on this bench in Borelli’s Park.

Alexand Merek

She has become one of the most important parts of my life. I write about her, draw her, translate what she has told me, and she is now a living breathing woman, with stories and dreams. I’ve met her wife. She’s left handed, like me. We have things in common, but she exists outside of me. When I die, she, and her stories, will live on. Today, I took my real baby, Sam, to the bench my fictional baby, was conceived.

Sam

This may seem a bit odd, and you can tell from his face, he was patronising me. It wasn’t something I had planned. We just happened to be in Farnham, and were passing by the park. I hadn’t even visited Alexand’s bench in decades. But here am I, sitting on her bench, with my son. The river and the bridge are still exactly the same as they were back then. The sound from the road, and people walking along the pathway, probably similar to how it was, when Alexand had introduced herself to me. I wanted to mark a moment, in time. My son and my daughter. Two very different and precious worlds, sitting on the bench with their mother.

Life and Other Distractions

Alexand Merek

I used to be able to write effortlessly, but recently I’m having trouble. This is the first thing I’ve written for about two weeks. I managed to finish a micro story recently, but work is really messing about with my head. It’s really stressful, and instead of dreaming about my characters, I’m stumbling about attempting not to think about my day job, and all its mundanity and aggression. This is going to be a brief entry. Hopefully, Alexand Merek will save me eventually from becoming another casualty, an office grunt. I’m feeling depressed about it, and no amount of self publication will allow me to escape from the fact this job is slowly eroding my creativity, and making me feel nothing. I have to make money, I just wish I could make it writing. I don’t feel alive anymore. It’s as if the world is broken and I want it to end.

 

Unbound Boxes Limping Gods: In the Beginning

I was 17 years old when I first met Alexand Merek. Yes, you heard me, I didn’t invent or conceive her, she came up to me and started talking, very quietly at first, in my left ear. I could hear her through my head phones. I remember listening to Cindy Lauper’s the World is Stone, after bunking off a Theatre Studies class at college that day. I didn’t like the noise, couldn’t take the drama, so my teenaged self decided to be alone.

I was sitting on a bench in a park called Borelli’s in Farnham, a rather disconnected and moody teenager. Alexand asked me if she could sit with me and listen to the song, as she needed a break from her world for a bit. The song reminded her of her life, and she asked me if she could talk with me, so she sat beside me, an invisible woman, who seemed somehow familiar, and I started to listen. I’ve been listening to her for the past 22 years, and haven’t stopped. She’s introduced me to her friends and family, and I’ve drawn them, written about them. I’m so glad I decided to sit on that bench in Borelli’s park that day, because I’m not sure I’d have met her if I hadn’t. She chose me to write about her, and I’m so thankful, as she has become my life. This is the very first drawing I sketched of her. For some reason I would only draw in black ink on lined paper back then. How weird was that?