We All Begin With Good Intent

And now for something completely different...

A ginger cat sits on a windowsill, poking its head out, searching. A man kneels before a house not his, he is holding something. A beer bottle, it’s 3pm and he looks a little like Cat Stevens. A guy and girl walk past with matching black dreadlocks, it is their only connection. A pair of faded shoes hang from the powerlines above.

None of this can be seen from inside the house though. Audrey is spitting in the bathroom sink. It’s the bitter taste of losing everything. Sound creeps under the door from the bedroom. She’s playing her weekly playlist, but it only has two songs. One encapsulates a hidden zeitgeist for life. The other is the song she will listen to when she stuffs up her life for good. It’s important to have these things. Audrey is that girl. The one who has a default answer for every question thrown her way. Most often you will hear her say “no” or “I’m okay”. This is also important.

Those shoes hanging from the powerlines, they are hers. The math isn’t important but she’s had them since she was 15 and they’ve been up there for 10 years.

She used to imagine the kind of animated characters that would climb their ladders to the sky and leave their shoes behind. Audrey thought shoes were for wearing, but that didn’t stop her thinking of ways to get hers up there. The shoes aren’t important however, at least, not imperative. There was nothing tragic about being 15, or the years that followed.

Audrey has often thought about chasing the black lines to the edge of the horizon. To jump up and pull them down, tangle them around her body, feed them through her veins and feed off their currents, because she’s running out of ways to feel alive again. There is nothing scientific about it though.

Truth is, Audrey has already played that song, the one about losing everything. You could probably guess why. There isn’t much to say, and she’s stopped counting the years because the time that has passed isn’t important. There was power in isolation and Audrey knew that best.

She hanged her soul from the powerlines one day because that was all that was left to do. And like those shoes and the ginger cat, and the man who looked like Cat Stevens, and the boy and girl with matching dreads, Audrey’s soul remained an indescript speckle on the landscape, chasing the endless sky. And that is important.