Shipwrecked Sunday

It’s Sunday, so therefore time for ‘Sunday Scribblings’ (an American website that offers creative writing prompt words) – but today’s didn’t grab me: it is ‘Shipwreck’.  Ah.  Let me think...  Johnny Depp springs to mind, obviously; as does the pirate outfit I’ve just ordered for a good friend’s hen night; plus there’s the treasure-chest-on-the-beach photograph I’ve used before as a prompt...and got nowhere beyond ‘sand’ with; and I mustn’t forget one of my earliest proper stories, a smuggler’s tale called ‘The Mystery of Swiftmouth Bay’ written in the last year of primary school. 

I’ve been sitting in the garden, snatching the sun that counts as a English summer, trying to come up with something – but, without mucho rethinking and mucho-mucho work, ‘Shipwreck’ is done for me.  However, in the notebook I was using to jot down my Sunday scribble*, I came across some free writing I’d done three years ago almost to the day – and thought I’d share it, unedited and so ‘free’, with you:

Words words words: words pulse through my brain like electricity and every so often one shocks me – an electric shock that tells me I am alive, I am a reader, I am a writer.  Words are like the feathers in a bird’s nest, comforting, downy, recognisable, familiar.  Words are strong, I am strong with words.  What if I couldn’t communicate?  What would I do without words?

But there will always be an absence of something.

And yet there is always the appearance of something else.  When I came to these pages, I had no idea what would fill them, and here I am, writing, feeling the pen across the page, lift, dip, smooth, sharp, stroke, roll, write, caressing the paper, this intimate dance we have.

And maybe it’s all I need to feel my pen across my page and know words are filling the space in ways I didn’t expect, didn’t anticipate; ways that surprise me, please me.  Ways that will lead to a meaningful paragraph, or idea or connection.

It is the beginning.                                                                                           

*I hasten to add that this Sunday isn’t without any scribbling at all – after dinner, I will be working on the beginnings of poem number four in my sequence of eight – but the theme is alchemy/apprenticeship rather than shipwreck/pirate...or at least, it is at the moment...!