Here's my first piece of writing from this new more truthful place. I don't know what I think of it. It's not in line with my professed values, but it's more truthful than pretending. It's starting from where I am.
If anyone has any comments, I would love to hear them (not that anyone ever does :p). (Jared - you constructively criticise mine and I'll constructively criticise yours *nudge nudge* [if you give me the url that is]).
Goodnight!



Jenna Carlyle


There was war even here. The tiny vessels of single men who could not stand, they made their way in undetected to the home front itself. If you don’t go to the war, it will come and meet you where you are, my grandmother used to say. She was there on the day the city way down under was filled with the sounds of that creeping battle. A shell went right by her head, she said. How surreal, when you think you’re so far from the perils of that elsewhere battle, safely tucked away in an unimportant continent, but the war comes to you. Meets you on your own turf.
My grandmother was always talking about war as though we were still in the middle of one. I remember when she lived with us. Even the house was a battle zone to her. Nothing was safe from the war, she said. She spoke as if The Enemy could come in any second and slaughter us all. When we were on the phone, she would stand there, staring, monitoring what we said, to make sure we didn’t let slip any details that might betray us – address, name, plans for what we would do tomorrow. The moment we uttered the first syllable of some vital detail she would snatch the phone from our hands and slam it down, cutting off the call, then look about wildly and tell us we were mad.
The first time I brought a friend over, Tamryn, I think her name was, she grabbed her by the shoulders and started interrogating her. Who are you? What do you want? Tamryn looked so afraid, I wondered what my grandmother saw in her. I could not see anything but a shocked little girl with tears in her wide eyes. What was it that my grandmother saw there?
She was afraid of shadows. She insisted we take her bed away and leave only a mattress – that way there could be nothing hidden, waiting to get her as she slept. Sometimes at night I thought her fantasies had come true, and I ran to her room to find…just her. Just her, shouting, crying out for help. Midday was the only time of calm. I remember standing with her on our quiet street, straight underneath the sun, feeling so relieved that the shadows had disappeared, while she held my hand and looked down at me, not as though I was about to die or about to betray her, but as though I was her granddaughter.

I don’t imagine her in heaven. Even when she died, when I was eight, someone told me she was smiling down from a better place, but I couldn’t see that. I imagine her as an angel of the world. A shadow angel over my shoulder. Her body died, so she took up sentry duty in my life. Once when I went for a job interview, I heard this inaudible voice in my ear, and I just froze up and couldn’t answer any of the questions they asked me. Then a few months later the company went bankrupt, and the CEO was caught for fraud and sexual harassment of an emplyee. And one night, this unspeaking voice came again suddenly, and I tripped and my shoe fell off, and I had to stop to put it back on. When I got to the bus stop, the bus had just pulled away from the curb, so I got a taxi. Near home, we passed by the bus – T-boned by another as it came up the hill.

Last night an angel hovered over my bed. A different angel. An angel made of light, who was before me, not behind. I looked at her through slits of sleeping eyes, and she whispered secrets into my heart. At midday the next day the voiceless tone, a very different angel, sounded in my head again – and I ignored it and kept walking, out to the middle of an empty football field. I waited. Silent, poised. Slowly, the shadows began to reappear as the sun descended through the sky. They grew longer and longer, and I just stood there, stood in a world of shadows, until I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around, and there was my grandmother, smiling.