MUSINGS FROM MIDLIFE
My Stories
Her Hands
“I told my friend I was hitting an emotional wall. She said, sometimes walls are there to lean on and rest. I cannot even begin to express how much I needed to hear that.” Unknown
Still now I see her hands, soft, veined and holding the book. She reads my favourite tale, The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde. I am twelve pleading with her to read it to me. She chides, “you’re getting too old to be read to”, and gives in like she always does.
The Journey
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice — though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you did not stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognised as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do — determined to save the only life you could save.