thoughts.

Not all Wednesdays are alike. Today begins with a bad song. Julian is picking at his guitar and I am busy filling a silence. Outside, the sky over the water is dank and streaked with charcoal and white. We’ve been this way for a while, sitting on an abandoned jetty where only stray cats and birds spend their time. He pulls a rolled up yellow scarf out of his hat, keeps playing. In my hand is crumpled paper. The pier, built some large number of years ago, is no longer safe to touch in places, where weather has beaten splinters upright and made deep fissures in cracked wood.

At the moment I am talking about pie. “And what is bumbleberry anyway? I feel like it should be blue. Is there a fruit called a bumbleberry? Muffin flavours should translate into pie, why haven’t I ever had a banana pie? It sounds like a good concept, is it?”

“Can’t say for sure.” He is slightly more mathematically minded than I, and I can see that he is making logical connections in his head to counter my babble. “Unless you try a whole bunch of banana pies. And aren’t there bananas in banoffi pie?”

Julian, I found immediately upon our first encounter, is not someone I can bring myself to ever really dismiss out of mind. I find him intelligent in ways other people are not, and respect his honest way of speaking coherently and thoughtfully, especially in his responses. Everything someone says is considered important, and the sincerity of his nature quickly grows on you, compelling you to think before you speak. This either leaves one feeling either a smidgen foolish to have wasted breath on idle talk without substance or truth, or else vaguely pleased to have been acknowledged as a good mind.

“Perhaps,” I admit grudgingly, and we fall silent for a little while.

The other person with us is Di, my roommate and friend from first year in university. Together we live above a small used bookshop just off the pier, owned by my mother. We work part-time in sharing management of the store. My mother, Ella, lives in a city several hours away. Today for her began with a letter from her father, informing her of her parents’ upcoming divorce. Despite being grown up, I can see that the news has shaken her. It is also somehow unspoken but implied that she does not want to talk about anything.

Her voice is tinged with a strange note of sarcasm that makes Julian look up and drop his pick between the boards and into the water. “Bollocks.” He is extremely English.

We leave the pier and head back towards the town. The street near the sea is corroded with the salty spray.

Once upon a time there was a yellow candle. It stood upon a brown desk, along with a green candle, a stack of blank papers, and a typewriter.

This morning, as on every morning of this month, it is joined by a mug full of milky tea and a faint splash outline as the mug is put down with rather too much force. The owner of the candles, desk, paper and typewriter is a girl with curly hair and glasses. The hair is pulled up into a tight ponytail, the glasses always slightly askew. As always, she gives a large sigh and reached for a nearby rag, which she uses regularly to mop up the spilt tea.

The yellow candle remains unamused, and unlit for the remainder of the morning and afternoon. Page after page of brightly white paper rolls into the typewriter and flies out with a loud noise, covered with tiny black characters. At about lunchtime, the flow slows, and the pile of blank paper is sizeably diminished.

An hour later, the only sign that things are different is a slice of cucumber lying on the corner of the typewriter. It finds itself removed in due course, and the typing continues, punctuated only by sighs of annoyance and the steady tapping of a leaky faucet nearby.

A knock at the door sounds immediately after the candles have been lit, first the green, and then the yellow. The glasses turn, and reflect the face of a boy, dark and smiling.

“Any better today?” A male voice, cracking the silence of the day. No more is light filtering through frosted panes of glass. Flames and shadows dance silently and irregularly on the walls of the dark studio apartment.

A yawn and a stretch. "Better than yesterday, actually. Come and read." She makes her way to the kitchen area and the tapping noise changes to the steady gush of water rushing into a kettle. It is red and battered with time and frequent misuse, and now banged unceremoniously on an oversize stove, free to do as it wills.