My Dear Readers,

A stunning piece by two magnificent writers: Rachel and Watt.
I am thrilled to have them as my guests today.
Below, please read their comments on collaborating with each other, and their piece All’s well that ends well.

Rachel: regarding Watt and I’s writing, it has always been a remarkably easy process.  We both admired each other’s writing, and in his words: “It’s easy to tread each other’s tracks without losing our own essence.  When we write together, inspiration seems to brush shoulders with us like it might with an old friend, and words gather themselves effortlessly and travel to the mind.”

All’s well that ends well

Over time, real time, life has segmented me in sides and faces with very vague definitions.  I sense that there are things about me that are routinely yet obscurely fed to a vending machine which gives me newer passions, different interests in return. Maybe I can trace it back to “when” but “why” is draped in nights when I lay awake with a dream in mind, and the next morning seems to blur it into a background that slowly fades into wallpaper that needs to be torn down because it’s just not as pretty anymore.

The ‘why’ is so much harder than the ‘when,’ but December raises the downy hair of yesterday on the back of my neck. No embrace for the girl of that calendar month, just a sigh of resignation and despair that rustles all the other pages of the calendar. My eyes see a whole year of good intentions and failed dreams that cling so desperately to that wall and under my skin. It’s like the realisation that last New Year’s hope was just an impulsive mistake and I forgot to make any brightened resolutions.

And it becomes an yearly abstraction, a push that plummets fractions, breezeblocks, out of an otherwise linear tower of reality. I look back at the lost pieces, and with what may be an illusion of growth, smile. That ache seems so small, unimportant, and what I have now seems okay for a minute. Maybe longer. Depends on the length of the song I listen to, and the longevity of the setting sun.

I can only say it in a whisper but this year has magnified the aches that have lingered for a lifetime. There’s a desperation in looking for the missing pieces in the fading colours of the sunset. In the hungry chaos of noisy gulls, I try to collect my crowded thoughts into groups of words that might ease my chapped lips and pour my coffee in the morning. I string them into necklaces and charms made of sentences – poems of moonless Septembers and melancholy Sundays. That way I can at least look at tomorrow without shielding my eyes.

There is something about words strung together in a sensible philosophy. Its incomparable to have had times in your life that sharpens its blunt edges and cuts into parts of you, refreshes everything somehow, and becomes strange to look at. Like gawking at your reflection on the mirror plated wall of a hair salon, while the barber keeps trimming your hair in a really bad way but all you can do is investigate your face and strike your eyes with a gaze they obviously meet. Just to realize, that it’s all there what needs to be, what isn’t, will grow back with more original strands and fibres. There’s always a road to walk towards everywhere, and since ‘all roads lead to Rome’, why does anybody worry.

Please continue reading on Rachel’s site here
or on Watt’s site here

I truly hope you enjoyed their magnificent work.

A gentle reminder that my book, Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings, will be available for pre-order on April 14th; publication date April 20th.

Love and good health to everyone.
Gabriela

@short-prose-fiction (Gabriela Marie Milton)