I’ll make you a cup of tea.

In the murky muddy chaos of this vortex, like the blackest eye of a furious hurricane – a rose blooms.

Thorny rose, beautiful velvety petals, a black vortex of their own in their deep scarlet. Yet it gleams in the silent rage that storms around it. Sizzling fury, angry and red, and it shines in the middle like a beacon of … reality.

Reality is thorns under the satin exterior of a happy experience.

Its sailing down a hill to crash in a heap at the bottom.

Its weeks of stable happiness ending in an afternoon of rage and disappointment.

But it is not just that, either, is it. Scorched dress in front of a fire. Fiery hair thrown over a pair of strong arms. Dancing in the silvery glade of moonlight. Standing still in the light before dawn. Wisdom and a cup of tea.

It’s waking up the next morning and realising one is no longer sore from the injury a week before.

It’s making a cup of tea and drying tears, sitting on the porch steps in that pre-dawn light and as the sun rises slowly over trees, houses, train-tracks.. as it has done for thousands of years.. as it will continue to do for thousands more.. it’s the rising hope that one can un-crumple oneself and gather one’s scruples and race up towards the slowly chugging train of life and grab its handle and leap on again.

It won’t trundle off on the tracks without you.

Fruits of Labour

Daily writing prompt

Have you ever had surgery? What for?

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Yes I have had surgery, twice. Surgery to entice my children out into the world.

The first was an emergency surgery, doctors swiftly pulling my consciousness under a thick blanket of anaesthesia and deftly slicing my insides open to pull my baby out, his heart rate dropping rapidly. They did the job in under eight minutes and wheeled me away to a recovery room. When I came to, I was so sleepy, and they gently put his little sleeping body onto my skin as so we could wake up from the ordeal together.

The recovery from that was awful, but I don’t think its a story that needs to be told.

The second surgery was elective. An elective c section. I elected to have doctors slice me open to pull my second baby out, and this time I was awake for the duration of it. It was a fascinating, mesmerising experience, and I do not regret it at all.

My second baby was a fat little dumpling who was wide awake and such a strong little thing.

She still is. I see her carrying a mountain of joy and scattering it wherever her little feet take her.