by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com or martinantonsmith@gmail.com
Her name was Rose W. Thorn
(Not her real name at all)
She was as they say a ‘small town girl’.
Who like all the kids in high school from the late eighties and nineties and beyond.
Was told by the clueless teachers you had to ‘go to university’ (or yer nuthin’?).
So she ditched the small town and studied something in the nearest city with a uni.
(In fact I did that too, didn’t we all? we were such lemmings!).
Of course moreover all the young want to leave their small towns – we all know it.
(And I’m not saying that’s bad per se).
She graduated with a quasi-profession credential and got an office job….
(She wanted to be an architect but didn’t have the grades – I can sympathize I wanted to be a physicist! What a pity that I couldn’t get out bed to see dear Einstein’s Equations)
Ironically she got an office job in a small town – one not so unlike her hometown.
(But aren’t small towns all roughly the same anyway?)
She had to return to this state of affairs – there were no big city jobs for her – for there was a recession in the early nineties.
It was the only office job she could get in her ‘line of Uni’,
(Beggers can’t be choosers just starting out).
So she stayed and started her career off – a good temp outcome it seemed.
She grinded…she grinded…and it was so long ago now that she may have even used a typewriter (?)
A couple years passed.
Her early ‘apprenticeship’ was duly achieved.
But she was still very young and anxious not to waste her youth (the young run on instinct).
Her feet were getting decidedly ‘itchy’ – as young peoples feet do when stuck in a boring place.
She was shy, but at heart adventurous – especially when blind drunk.
(We all drunk a lot back then, and we who lack confidence need it as social medicine. Entire Nations are like this).
But to go backwards a little.
At this first career-job she met a guy,
Who of course fell in love with her.
(Some people are of course all too easy to fall in love with – she was like that).
He wanted to settle down young marry, have kids and front lawn and a Labrador.
But she wanted to travel the world and party, see the sights, have total freedom.
(And Ultra-independence was like gold to her).
So she said goodbye to him and the future labrador and hello to a plane, a flying tin can.
She soon travelled around the world.
To England, most of Europe, and even to Africa and some other unnamed wild places too.
While on the road she stayed in many a dingy backpackers.
(As you do and are happy to do with at that age – in fact I did it for a long time).
For her home base she stayed in the typical antipodean way – ‘ten person flats’ with only two or three rooms.
After the first bout of travel she pulled beers in England and mixed a few temp office gigs too.
She partied hard – this goes without saying:
(On that looking back – were not the nineties simply an extension of the sixties and seventies?)
She was a westerner in the late 20th century and young.
The parties and dopamine and hormone based experiences rolled on.
(Don’t make me spell them out either, I couldn’t tell you details as I wasn’t with her).
When she was finally Thirty she had to give up that five years of fun and duly went home –
(So back in the tin can it was).
The ‘flat land of red dirt’ some thirty flight-hours away was calling.
She returned to a big dirty city for the rest of her career and is still there some twenty five years later.
(I dare say she will probably stay for the rest of her life).
She could never settle down – and she didn’t really want to.
She was used to and programmed for short relationships and fun times with the men with rizz aplenty.
The ‘trap of excitement’ you might say.
As she aged and all around her settled down – she steadfastly resisted.
Many whisperers did appear from ‘various gossipers’,
They said ‘she couldn’t love’, and of course much worse.
This was not the case that she ‘could not love’- the truth was that she actually loved too hard.
(Well once in a blue moon that is when the right biological, time-a-logical, socio-intellectual bloke arrived.)
Unfortunately, on ‘matters of the heart’ – she had a curse.
And when she did feel love or closeness, the electronics in her body went haywire.
(Her nervous system would pull rank on her)
Those pangs of anxiety simply wouldn’t let her settle down with one guy, once and for all.
Tragically the more she felt loving feelings the further she was made to run.
(Perversely this meant she could only essentially marry the ‘amorphous male blobosphere’).
So she kicked to the kerb many guys she really liked, and a couple or at least one of these she loved.
Not becasue she wanted to.
She had to.
(Her internal physiological Sergeant Major had pulled rank).
The electronics inside were stronger than diamond chains around her feet,
And it would take a series of perfectly planned and executed wars to break those chains,
To then allow the feelings of closeness not to trigger electrical short circuits within.
(I hope that day comes)
And so her career rolled on, money was made, rent was paid.
But as the years rolled,
Her social life was increasingly a ever slightly degrading repeat and rehash of her youth in England/Europe.
(You see with addiction, the hit gets less high each time).
Perhaps now described best as quasi-controlled-debauteurous weekends,
Mixed with typical middle class dinner parties, drunk racing events, cafe coffees and brunches.
As the grey hairs grew she new she was having the same year, done many times over.
(The Sergeant Major was not yet in retirement and was still ‘blasting ears’)
She knew she wasn’t happy (I know as she even let slip one day – but weren’t we city-o-office-o’s all that way?).
At heart she always wanted to be an entrepreneur – set her own hours – do her own thing.
But she got trapped as a salary-woman in a mega city does.
(After all – is not the invention of the ‘big city’ the oldest trap on humankind there is?)
Late in life she tried to become an entrepreneur –
I’m not sure if that worked.
After all, entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs while young.
They find a way – becasue it is who they are.
I guess I was lucky that she couldn’t handle long term closeness,
Becasue we would have never met at that drunken bar when she was pushing forty.
(When we kissed, didn’t come home with me and then handed me her business card pre taxi home)
Of course I may be deluding myself.
I could easily say using joes-schmo logic ‘that was a ruinous night and the start of a war’.
But now old I know that sometimes you meet who you need to meet at the time.
(And it will disrupt and shift your entire life).
And it might be someone who allows the needed dismantling of your entire life to occur.
That would not have happened otherwise.
And I guess that’s why I met her.
(I had a not just a destiny-date with a mirror – but a date to be thrown through it to a parallel-life)
But with the peace-and-fun-becoming-full-blown-war (that was us) being now long over,
With the mustard gas that was stinging my (our?) eyes long gone –
I (we?) can now see that clearly.
And isn’t it interesting that there is one part inside myself that has never changed.
Perhaps that is a all-knowing holographic part of her inside my chest.
I don’t know if that’s a healthy assessment – but I don’t really care.
It is simply an immovable object inside.
It is what Olympus Mons is to the surface of Mars.
But the question is (and has been over the rolling years) what to do about it?
Does the famous climbers Q & A adage hold for me? –
“Why did you climb that mountain? – becasue it’s there”.
And so I sometimes look at Olypus Mons, from far away Earth.
And I wonder if I too would/should Travel there.
To see her in true strikingly perfectly imperfect unique beauty.
After all – I believe that today she is still ‘There’.
Yet currently at star-date 2026.4958 I am still ‘Here’.
Perhaps I am like an asteroid that collided on Olympus Mons with a ‘glancing blow’,
And so natural physical law demanded I skip away into the black skies never to return.
Yet information cannot ever be scrubbed.
Yet the scars of the collision remain within the asteroid’s hulk, within me,
As so do more than a few small fragments of her (my ‘Olympus Mons’).
So I guess if I never see her rugged striking heights and cosmically unique grandeur again,
I can always say she never one hundred percent left anyway.
I carry literally a few pieces of her with me through space and time.
And will her short-circuiting electronics (her Sgt. Major Syndrome) ever be fixed before she is gone?
Perhaps when it is, this will be the spark that starts the spaceship’s thrusters,
And while I am thinking I will simply be whisked away to see her.
Physics itself will be in ‘dictatorial charge’ of the matter.
(it will issue an edict that will happen).
Yes – let’s end it there and agree to that seemingly quasi-copout shall we?
(Why do the most frank assessments also seem so glib and weak sounding or is it just me?).
It is time to wrap it up.
After all this prose poem has become an odyssey in its own right,
(Or is it the modern-version unsent letter?).
And perhaps with a mind of its own, and definitely a nervous system.
So there is now only one more line that I have to say,
And whatever the future holds it will remain true for everlasting eternity.
And that last line is this:
She was she, I was me, and we both still are…..
(And at least if nothing else – I still have that).
BONUS MATERIAL: WHAT DOES THE WORDPRESS AI BOT THINK OF THIS WRITING?
Anton Martin Smith Writer 