Instalment Eighty Three

Will to Live
You’ve all got it wrong, with your Last Will and Testament and your stupid ‘Bucket Lists.’ Here are all my things, ready listed out for you all to divvy up and here is my list of everything I have done. No! I won’t do it. Little wonder these people die. What do they have to live for, huh? I wanted to do these things and I did them. What do they get up for in the morning then? Nothing, so they die. Stupid bastards. These lists, jump outta a plane, Paris, go on TV. Idiots. That is as big as they can dream? Dream small and die small. This here, what you are reading, this is my Will To Live.

I will live till my grandchildren have grandchildren.
I will live until those who have hurt me do not.
I will live to see great ideas proven wrong and mad ones proven right.
I will live until no one knows my name.
This is my will to live.

Signed, 

Legacy

“Hey, I’ve found his will,” said a woman boxing positions of a man who passed away alone aged 162. “I always thought his name was Greatgreatgreatgreat Grandpa.”

Instalment Eighty Two

Ever since she left, I stayed to my side of the bed. The right side was her side and I couldn’t bring myself to spread out. So I slept where I was. That bit of bed started to take the shape of my body. One morning the depression in my bed stopped me getting up. My depression had grown deeper and I could not escape from it. My depression had grown since she left me, when we shared a whole bed and our whole lives. When we were in love. Immersed in my own depression I lay.  I slept. I would wake, stare at the ceiling and I would sleep some more as my depression grew around me, trapping me further.

In the days when I had been busy and in love there would have been nothing that would please me more than days in bed, to rest, especially with her. A bedsore sounded like a badge of the well rested, but no longer. Now I longed for the black and blue bags to return under my eyes, a sign of a full life. Not one lived in bed in your own depression. Live, love, laugh and rotate your mattress.

Instalment Eighty One

There’s a race of people worse than those we keep prisoner in mirrors, whose revenge for incarceration is to show us our world as it truly is rather than how we choose to see it. There’s a race of people you meet only in dreams. We punished them to a life of twilight non-existence, but in return we must visit them every night so as to not forget our cruelty. The dream people have become distorted, twisted and evil. They toy with us, punish us at every turn, every night. They pervert our lives, tease us with their mocking pantomimes, designed to confuse and enrage us. To dispirit us by disfiguring our daily lives.

Worse, they try to escape, to invade our world. Without bodies of their own they try and take ours.

Snoring is the warning, the alarm that Dream people are trying to cross over, trying to take a body for themselves. They suffocate you in dreams and your sleeping body reacts. You don’t have long to live. You must wake a snorer, they are not keeping you awake, they are dying. If they stop snoring by themselves and awaken to say, “Where am I,” it’s too late.

Instalment Eighty

“I love you because you make me so happy,”(emphasis added, mine)

You make me happy. People say this all the time, especially during weddings. It’s the most selfish thing I can think of. It’s all about the person saying it. They like being made happy. Selfish. It’s no surprise though. I used to know Love, not a nice man, not at all. Love was always talking about himself in the most florid, over the top terms. And God forbid you were not as happy as him, wouldn’t he let you know what you were doing wrong and how you could be as happy as him, if only you tried a bit harder, got out more, smiled. I wrote a letter of complaint once, to the daily paper, The Corinthian:

Love is impetuous, love is cruel. Love does envy and Love does boast. Love is proud. He dishonours others and is self-thinking. Love is easily angered and keeps a full record of wrongs.  Love does not necessarily delight in evil but does rejoice and crow of his own good fortune. Love always protects Love, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres to look after himself.

But they changed it before printing.

Instalment Seventy Nine

It wasn’t evolution or technology that finally led to humans flying. It was fitness. It had been possible all along, someone just needed to put in the hard yards and work at it. As with birds, it all came down to power and weight, get the ratio right and you can soar like Icarus. A lanky guy called Sage figured it out. He measured and weighed himself, crunched a few numbers and saw a chance of what might be. He trained for eight years until he first took off. He had built himself stick thin but strong. And he could fly.

It was the new, new thing. Like pilates, boot camp and hot room yoga before it, everyone decided they must, no, needed train at Sage’s feet. To fly like him. To sculpt their bodies into a temple of his design.

It was a new measure of wealth, of prosperity. Just out for a fly with the family, oh yes my daughter was flying when she was only eight, of course she took off a few times before then.


It became another reason for the poor, the old, the fat and the odd to hate themselves. They would never fly.

Instalment Seventy Eight

She had a few lunchtime walks that she liked but decided to try something new. A dirt track following the river, rising cliff like above the water. Walking along the edge she saw a rope dangling, just out of reach. Thick, sturdy rope with knots for climbing, hanging down from the sky. A gust of wind made it sway. Impulsively she snatched at it. She’d a firm hold but poor footing. Its fall or climb she thought, so she climbed.

She climbed til her arms ached. Fearing she would fall, she pushed on until she reached a cliff face. She pulled herself through the dirt. The cliff was the same as the one she just left. Only the rope was tied off to a rock with another hanging from the sky. Forgetting her toil, she again climbed again. Pulling herself up, she found what could be the same cliff, with yet another rope hanging down.  She staggered back to the office.

“You look like someone who used to work here, her name was Ambition,” her boss said.

“Rising to fast, too soon in life renders you unrecognisable to those that knew you,” she replied, returning to the cliff to climb.