I met him again, all boozy and stinking of fags. He handed me an antique postcard he’d sat on earlier in the day.
‘I got this for you.’ He said handing it to me,
‘You’ve sat on it for me too’ I replied.

‘Have you been casting spells on me?’  I hadn’t, obviously.

Instead; I’ve been feeling and watching the sea beneath me move, where here every bit of inspiration and thought inaccessible but so close by passes me like traffic. I’m letting myself be distracted by men but it’s a decoy. They are a beautiful wiry story I fall for, when in conflict- I feel true to the pull of the sea, watching its movements so better to use it, connect to it- sway with it. 

It’s not dark enough Ellen, God, you’re so cheesy sometimes.
I continue to watch myself.

I step out, I go to the Post Office and I sit with a cat in the Co-Op car park. He’s  beautiful and healthy, I lay with him outside in awe as he rolls; I play with him, all the while cooing at him and fussing. On the way back I play on a swing. I leave when a young family arrive and assume they’d find me odd, a woman in her 30’s swinging on her own quite intensely- in a dumb way.

I try not to be purple, floral – contrived but it makes me self conscious when I’m running from hyperbole. Why the need to be real? When that’s an affectation? And what good is authenticity if you do it for superiority?  For self betterment, who in the universe do you need to impress that much?

I fear my mindless rumination or anything else for that matter.

I don’t know why I make these images anymore but also, I do!
It’s a *felt* sense of sincerity that I struggle to articulate. And as the days pass I struggle to get out of bed too. It’s not sadness anymore in as much as it is exhaustion or a form of forgiveness-kindness to myself for the mindful marathons and mental extortions I run. A lifelong battle of ‘why I do I need to be up again?’ so I lay down again and relief and guilt pass over me. ‘Shouldn’t I be at work or something?’  I seem dramatic and the shades and hatred wash over again and again and again.

Religion as daft and holy, of taking the vicar to the train station and he hangs in the seat and tells me I am beautiful. I believe he meant it as confused encouragement. Beyond his fallible humanity is the essence of a person touched by the relief he’s lost, it gives him reason to search on. He is the puzzled look of a faint memory of complete peace and equanimity combined with the closeted inability to admit that he’s worried he may never find peace again.

So in unconscious reassurance I find myself worshipping in my darkroom with caustic chemicals and my automatic actions- the vapid conduit in which I conduct transcendence; in a bid to express *my* lost connection, I’m haunting the idea of peace and serenity that I too once felt, before I was here and after I am here again.

NB *For the Americans among me, fags’ are slang for cigarettes in the UK.