A while back, I promised I’d “blog” a little more, simply because photos of puppies, while among the best things to exist, view, and share, don’t benefit in any particular way from my personal approach to posting them. Instead, here’s a dumb piece of exploitative purple prose that reveals a part of my soul, or whatever.
I wrote this piece a little while back for class, before I realised I’d rather write something silly and non-comittal. Something that would guarantee at least 3 appreciative chuckles and one sizeable laugh while I told it. This piece rested for a few weeks, before I brought it to class and read it after all. People liked it, and I’ll put it here, too, sans some of the more personal stuff that was in the middle here. That’s reserved exclusively for people who don’t know me at all.
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Since 1992, I have visited Hope Cove, Devon every summer for at least a week. Like Christmas movies, or rain, or that one song you haven’t heard since you were a child, Hope Cove inhabits its own reality within mine, existing within a parallel life.
There are rocks on the beach of Inner Hope. I know the shape and the colour and the feel and the warmth of them by instinct. I know the hidden parts of them and the beach that, on discovery, become at once obvious and at once a desperate secret. My childhood heart fell in love on these rocks several times, before it fell out with my milk teeth into the cold sand.
There were seven of us who would travel to Hope Cove, in midnight convoys south, cutting across the breadth of England. We would arrive in the early hours of the morning to be greeted by the neighbours we had come to know well, who were sat at picnic tables just as we had left them the year before. Like Hope Cove itself, these neighbours existed here in their perpetual state, a casual breakfast forum with no time for work or socks.
This summer was the first that I did not travel to Hope Cove. The group went without me, the cars ran all the same, and when they got there, the same neighbours with the same sandals and the same newspapers greeted them.
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On my way back home from work one day this summer, the train slowed to a stop between two stations.
Ten minutes passed and nothing happened, save for the space growing warmer.
We were still, under thousands of tons of dirt and mud and water.
People use this dirt and mud and water every day, to get one place or another. They walk across it and one by one their footsteps bend the earth like a metal girder buckling under an extreme weight, until it presses against the top of a train that has stopped underground and begins crushing it. The people above continue to walk and drive and bike and the dirt and mud and water continue to crush the train. Eventually, where once there was a tunnel there will be earth. The train starts up again and begins moving through the collected mud. The engines weaken and the wheels lose grip, and the train moves slowly, too slowly, but unmistakably, through the mud and the dirt and the water until, piece by piece, it emerges, and begins to pick up speed one again. It stops at the next station without fail, its doors lining up perfectly with the expectant travelers who have gathered in particular spots on the platform in anticipation.
There’s a rock on the beach of Inner Hope that is bigger than the others and harder to climb. The trick is to approach it from the cliff above and climb down, rather than attempting up the front of it.
If you walk across the beach, up the slipway, and through the secret thicket leading to the cliff, and if you’re careful down to the rock and walk up it to the front of it, you can stand or sit there for hours, until the sun starts to set and from miles away anyone looking on will see you against the red sky.
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