I found an email with this header in my box just now from a close friend.
I don't understand the title, but attached was a 2000-word piece of creative writing describing a mother's pride on the night before her daughter's eighteenth birthday.
I don't understand why I have been sent this piece, submitted as part of a degre course.
It is intensely moving and very, very personal although personally I don't thinkit is desperately well written and could be more emotive if it were less intense.
As a critical evaluation, I rate it as nothing special, but knowing this person as I do, as an expression of herself to me as a close personal friend it is exhausting, emotional, deeply personal and made me cry.
We need to talk. To sit, to share a bottle of wine and talk.
If it is telling me what I think it says, then I am stunned, confused and might have found an avenue for confidence.
Here's one I prepared earlier, brought to mind by the passage:
Did you say I used to work here?
Are you sure?
It's hardly changed -
But what does that matter now
Without you and all your
Seventeen years beside me?
Let them stare
I dare not care
For you can sing
And they can hardly read
It's good of you to come.
You've put on weight since we last met.
I remember those shoes
Why can't I love you?
Is it because the trees stand like pillars of rock
Pitted by the tide
Or is it because you are my daughter's sister?
See that bench opposite the lab?
Beside the carp
I held you there
Underneath the summer trees that burn with secrets
Hanging fruit-like bats
Between The leaves, purple
Full of poison
Inside still those plastic blue chairs
Stacked in seeing rows.
Remember when we pushed them over
And they fell like dominoes?
We broke in one night
That cruel April
Drunk beyond compare
And you had those yellow sandals?
Concert halls and galleries
Theatres now bars
Tidal streets
Like rivers dry without the cars
They've called this place "Lovers' Walk"
I almost laughed out loud
Cashpoints gape
Like baby birds between these quiet buildings
Bathed in orange from the fire
Dawn's early rain upon my face
A blackbird sings a memory
How do your tears find me
In this place?
The war games are over now
The tables cleared
It should I know be you but tonight I'm drinking
Cider with Katherine
On the other side of time
How can I work now?
Bring on the tears
The Robin's Tiny Throat Baby Dee