seven silver sleepers

My friend's mum just died. Correction, my ex-girlfriend’s mum died last week but I only found out about it this morning via text-message. I was in the bus on my way to work thinking how I should reply, or even, should I reply? I didn’t know her at all and I’d met her only once. She’d commented to my then-girlfriend on the ‘metal junkyard’ in my ear. I don’t think she thought much of me at all, which was somewhat of a shock. I had always been the kind of girl that people wanted to take home to meet the parents.

Not this time.

I had seven piercings in one ear, three in the other, and a stud in my nose. And back then, (god, I make myself sound so old… back then… yes I suppose it was thirteen years ago, if not more…)

Back then that level of facial piercing was considered unusual, quite possibly the mark of a serial-killer or handbag-stealer.

I was neither. I just happened to have a good deal of scrap metal in my head, and none of it was for medical reasons.

Prior to the piercings, parents considered me intelligent, interesting, hell even nice. I wasn’t going to remove my piercings just because I might offend someone. On the contrary, they became somewhat of a bullshit-detector.

If you were going to judge me on appearance then by all means you could just bugger off. Besides, I was, and still am, deaf in my left ear. Completely and utterly. No surround sound for me.

It gave people a signpost: ‘don’t walk on her left side… don’t talk to her left side, she’s deaf… I said she won’t hear you…’

I liked to tell people that I used the earrings to stimulate all my acupuncture points in the vain hope that somehow it would trigger a regeneration of the nerve in my ear. Yes. I was trying to cure my deafness, could they not be so cruel as to comment on it? Just how superficial and shallow they were.

Late last year I removed all my earrings, my nose-piercing was taken out many years before. I did this for my partner’s sister’s wedding so that the photos wouldn’t have the shiny reflection of seven silver sleepers in the lens. I just never put them back in. Not for anything but sheer laziness.

Beginnings... beginnings... beginnings...

There is much to be said about the keeping of a diary, thoughts, phrases, ideas. All to be recorded in a notepad and saved for later. I have done this for years. There is a forest of unclaimed notes and general word-guff collecting dust on many of my bookshelves. Every time I move house (which hopefully now will NOT be often) I lovingly pack the books and lug them to their new residence. In short - I am a hoarder. Occasionally I will take them out, have a read, get awfully embarrassed and wonder why I kept them in the first place. Sometimes though, I am proud of what I wrote, and it marks the beginning of a new piece of writing.

This blog is the electronic version. (Oh duh! I hear you say. And... do we need these ramblings?)

No, you don't. But I think I do.

My shoes don’t match, that’s not to say that they’re not a pair. They’re in the style of the Mary-Jane: flat, rounded toe, thin strap across the foot. Very comfortable, very sensible. On the body of the left is embroidered three gold stars, on the right – a crescent moon, and hence, they don’t match, but still are most definitely a pair.

This morning he looked at me , smiled and burped. I waited the customary two seconds before the vomit that goes with the belch to appear. ‘You made cheese!’ I say. Though strictly it is much more like yoghurt, curdled milk. He smiles again and I wonder if I’m giving him a cheese-phobia. Not that he has to eat cheese when he is older, just that I don’t want him to be scared of it or think that it is made from vomit.

This is the beginning, I don’t know what happens next.

I caught a reflection of myself in the glass doors as I was walking past. The cut of my pants don’t seem to go with my shoes and the covering skirt is a different length on both sides. I don’t think I strive to be asymmetrical, it happens by accident.

It has been almost five months since his birth, and when I tell people this they look at me with incredulity –impressed that I have so quickly and easily shed my ‘baby-weight’. It is at this point that I correct them‑there was no baby weight. (Could they shut-up about the baby‑weight?) In fact it was my partner who gave birth, not I. and still, she had no baby-weight. Only three tiny stretch-marks to prove that he was ever in there to begin with.

Does it make me jealous? Yes, I suppose it does. I think I would have liked to feel the kicks from the inside, and known that there were two heartbeats; one- rapid-fire, the other somehow calmer, if not just slower.

But the jealousy doesn’t mature into the now. When my shoulder gets covered with yoghurt, freshly made and regurgitated with a smile, I know that he is also mine.

The blue eyes and blond hair surprise everyone. He even looks like me.