by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com or martinantonsmith@gmail.com
She was a small town girl.
Who like all the kids in high school from the late eighties and nineties.
Was told you had to go to university.
So she ditched the small town and studied something in a city.
Graduated and got an office job. …
….in a small town.
She had to – there was a recession in the early nineties.
It was the only job she could get.
So she stayed and started her career off.
A couple years passed.
Her feet were gettign itchy.
She was shy, but at heart adventurous.
At this first career-job she met a guy,
Who fell in love with her.
She wanted to trvel the world.
So she said goodbye to him and hello to a plane.
Travelled around the world.
England most of Europe and even Africa and some other places.
Stayed in backpackers – as you do.
After the first bout of travel she pulled beers in England and mixed a few office gigs too.
Partied hard – this goes without saying:
A westerner in the late 20th century and young.
When she was thirty she had to give up that five years and go home –
The flat land of red dirt some thirty hours away in a flying tin can.
She returned to a big dirty city for the rest of her career and probably her life.
She could never settle down – she didn’t want to.
She was used to short relationships and fun times with men with rizz.
As she aged and all around her settled down – she steadfastly resisted.
Many whisperers said she couldn’t love, and much worse.
This was not the case – she loved too hard.
And when she did, the electronics in her body went haywire.
They simply wouldn’t let her settle down.
So she kicked many guys she liked, and a couple she loved to the kerb.
She had to.
The electronics inside were stronger than diamond chains,
And would take a well planned war to change their settings,
To allow the feelings of closeness to trigger short circuits within.
And so the career rolled on, money was made.
The social life was a repeat and rehash of her youth in England.
Perhaps desciped best as quasi-controlled-debauturous weekends,
Mixed with typical middle class dinner parties, drunk racing events.
As the grey hairs grew she new she was having the same year, done many times over.
She knew she wasn’t happy.
At heart she always wanted to be an entrepreneur – set her own hours – do her own thing.
But she got trapped as a sallarywoman.
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 cloesness,
Becasue we would have never met at that drunken bar when she was pushing forty.
Of course I may be deluding myself.
I could easily say using joes-schmoe logic that was a ruiness night.
But sometimes you meet who you need to meet at the time.
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.
With the war now long over, and the mustard gas that was stinging my eyes long gone –
I can see that clearly.
And isn’t it interesting that their is one part inside myself that has never changed.
Perhaps that is her.
I don’t know if that’s healthy – but I don’t really care.
It is simply an immovable object inside my heart.
It is what Olympus Mons is to the surface of Mars.
But the question is what to do about it?
Does the famous climbers 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.
To see her.
After all – I believe she is ‘There’.
Yet currently at stardate 2026.4958 I am still here.
Perhaps I am like an asteroid that collided on Olympus Mons with a ‘glancing blow’,
And so natural law demanded I skip away into the black skies never to return.
Yet the scars of the collision remain within me,
As so do more than a few small fragments of her aka Olympus Mons.
So I guess if I never see her rugged heights again,
I can always say she never one hundred percent left anyway.
And will her short circuitng electronics 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.
Yes let’s end it there and agree to that quasi-copout shall we?
After all this prose poem has become an odyssey in its own right,
And perhaps with a mind of its own, and definitely a nervous system.
So there is now only one more line that I have forgotten to add:
She was she, I was me, and we both still are. .
And whatever the future holds – at least I will always know that truth must forever be.
Anton Martin Smith Writer 