It’s writing exercise time, again! This time the task was to use the prompt We spend our lives not seeing what we saw to draft three micro pieces – some poetry, some fiction, and a personal response. As always, I did these under time pressure and with the understanding that exercise of any kind isn’t meant to be pretty, it’s there to get the blood pumping and the creative juices flowing. So, yes, the writing here isn’t great, but if you read all the way down to the personal response, you’ll see that maybe I’m not caring quite as much as I once did. 🙂

I’m always on the look our for different writing exercises, so if you’ve got a favourite warm-up that you use, please share with me in the comments.

Our other story
I close my eyes
to banish the vision
exorcise the demons

they hold fast to my being
infiltrating my thoughts
my dreams
my waking moments

I long to go back
to erase those seconds
from my life
from my history
from my world

what might my life had been
had I not been there at that precise moment

how would I exist without those shadows?
would I realise my freedom?
would I cherish it?
would I be shackled by something else instead?

we cannot know our other story
of what might have been
of how things may have gone

we must live this one life
this one story.

Fiction

Breanne breathed deeply, her heart hammering her ribs. She was convinced it would burst through her chest in some Alien-esque manoeuvre if she couldn’t slow it down. She was back in the spot where it happened. She hadn’t meant to come here. She’d been out for a job and let her mind wander as she pounded step after step. And then somehow, here she was. Back after all this time.

It had been three years’ but the images were still so vivid. Vibrant in their colour, their sound. The detail crisp and clear. Every movement framed as though captured to be savoured at a later date. But she didn’t savour the memories – they repulsed her, filtrated her being.

Personal

One of the liberating things about getting older is that you no longer pretend. Instead, you accept yourself for who you are and, more importantly, who you aren’t.

You see your true self. You become so comfortable with you that you just want to shout it from the rooftops (okay, maybe not that, especially if you are afraid of heights like I am, but you get what I’m saying).

One of the things I am realising as I age is that I’ve never been particularly great at anything. Sufficiently skilled? Yes. Better than average? Yes, sometimes. Good enough to get by? By and large, yes. But I have never reached expert status. Never have I been a guru or a sage.

This can be a tough thing to accept about yourself – this idea that you are not that clever or that smart or that skilled. That you are just you. But that being ‘just you’ is actually okay.

So, I say to older age, bring it on! Bring to me your wisdom, your freedom, all of your liberties. I am ready. I am willing. I am able (well, able enough… ish…).