My patchwork decorated heart is a montage of the laughs and butterflies that ignited new loves and the wounds from betrayal and spiteful stabs that it suffered. Sometimes from a whisper that pricked up my ears attention but sometimes from the silence of only watching, can you look from the windows of your mind and see a truth that your ears may choose to ignore.
But more than anything the heavy pin-board of past memories in my chest, boasts its strength to romanticise pain so the honesty of its poem can tell the story of the reason why the love it found, is nothing less than real.
Materialism has never consumed me with its urge. I think it’s because I always felt something almost spiritual inside me which I could never fathom. But as my feelings taught me with the days of my years and the occurrences within them, in our lives and maybe after, we all own something more eternal than material treasures; a soul. And what makes the soul speak is the way we let it guide our heart. And I believe only when the soul is given a voice and allowed to express itself through love, can true happiness be found.
My scattered path of life had many different wrong turns. Wrong in the right kind of way. They shaped me. And they shaped my present. And a saying I will always swear by, despite maybe being a little optimistic or reassuring, is ‘everything happens for a reason’.
Like a billion other Western babies, I was born in a concrete jungle. It’s hard to see past the restricting walls when they are hidden by a web of institutionalised society. The walls my parents reside in were built when my Mother was 18 and my Father 22. They met and fell in love as young idealists do. My Fathers aspirations of a sculptor unwittingly ended when a wage wasn’t frequent and a 9-5 had to do the job.
400 miles of begging motorway confused my parents’ disparity and moved us back and forth to find a settlement that gratified a solution of a family base of our own. A compromise that differed whilst I was growing up but eventually found its place near my Fathers family which were never a key part in my upbringing other than the knife that twisted wretched arguments that tore at the knots of my parents hopeful marriage over the years and frayed the loose ends.
One room collected the very first histories of our new family. My parents and I shared my first year in grey curling wallpapered walls with nothing more than a mattress, a carry cot and a fridge. I don’t think anything can hold more of your life than the bricks of your home. Looking back, remembering the weathered décor of the old lady who passed away and allowed us to revive the small council house, to the rebuilt structures of a home that raised me, reflects the changes and adversities my 25 years have witnessed.
