Beautiful Nonsense.

There is a cliff and the wind is furious but I don’t feel it. A blurred face across from me shouting and screaming but no words reach me. I try to speak but can only do so telepathically. The cliff starts to move closer bringing the blurry face ever nearer. I’m weightless and merely a pair of eyes, and as the figure comes closer the shouting becomes a song, now I know who the figure is and suddenly I’m in a department store, I’m trying on clothes and there is a giant mirror and a voice is calling me fat. I can’t fit in to anything and now the shop is getting smaller and I thought I was in a changing room but I’m actually in the middle of the street, and it’s busy but nobody stops, and I’m looking for a bus stop when buildings start to rise all around me.

The blurry face is behind me as my tarot cards fall from the sky. We’re back to back and I start my reading and it’s the two of cups, a recognition of love and the blurred face understands and relates it to their life and tells me about a love they once had, and it’s my love, and this makes it very easy to tell them about this love, and the blurred face is wowed by my gift and asks me if I can contact its dead father and of course I can, I tell them details about their father that nobody else would know and reassure them that their father is looking over them and wants them to be careful when buying that new car, and the face exclaims that it has been thinking about this and I’m turning over cards without touching them because I can will them to be what I want when the table starts to swallow me, and the blurred face laughs and tells me it was all a lie, that they knew the love they spoke of was mine and not theirs.

I’m getting ready for school and desperately trying to find ways to suck in the shape of my stomach. The frustration fills me with ideas of illness and my tears are soaking the floor. Suddenly I start to grow and feel a terrible pain as I expand to the size of the bathroom, and I can’t breathe properly as my family look on unconcerned. Their tutting noises echo throughout the neighbourhood and attract unwanted attention and now he’s there and the sneer on his face is immune to my silent pleading, I’m spiralling and whizzing above my house like a balloon that’s just had the air let out and somehow I know that he did this and there is nothing I could do to stop him and once it’s finished I’m tiny, so much smaller than everybody else, and my family tower over me and tell me it’s for the best.

Now I’m on stage and can feel a Kenneth in the room, without words I ask whether anybody knows a Kenny and the audience abounds in agreement and arranges itself into symmetrical rows and columns. As I infer Kenny’s comments from the ether I start to levitate on the waves of clapping I rightly deserve and suddenly I’m ranting at all those who believe my craft to be a fake. If only they were here now and could understand that their negativity interferes with the spirit world making it impossible for them to see the truth. The room becomes bright red based on my anger and I’m startling my congregation so much that they fall like domino’s and so I become a faith healer, and my arms stretch out, way out in to the auditorium only I can’t control them and they start to wrap themselves around groups of people and begin crushing them, only It’s I that can’t breathe and as I gasp for air the blurred face points out that Kenneth is my husband.

Suddenly I’m at the doctors reception and waiting for the appointment I have there next Tuesday. A song I heard earlier today is playing on the radio. There are children everywhere pretending to be aeroplanes and the noise they make reminds me of the flight I took last Wednesday. As I stand up I’m transported into the doctors office and surrounded by groceries. As I stoop to put them back in to bags the words ‘high blood pressure arthritis’ fill the air and I know the news is bad. The doctor is nowhere to be seen but there is a sphygmomanometer around my arm and it feels like it’s draining the blood rather than measuring its pressure levels. I pick up a family photograph and it’s a picture of my daughter surrounded by taunters. I try my hardest to erase them by rubbing at their faces with my thumb. It becomes very important that I find her and before I know it I’m stapling ‘have you seen this girl?’ posters to lamp posts and offering a reward for her safe return. Now I’m in a saloon wearing a cowboy hat and everybody else is riding about on horses. My posters are now detailing the problems associated with high blood pressure, and something in me knows I have to change my diet for my daughters sake.

I’ve been invited to appear on a national television show and display my gifts to skeptical hosts. I start by asking their star signs and relate mundane advice about what coat they should wear later on in the week. My daughter appears alongside me and a ouija board appears on a low coffee table. I sense discomfort in my hosts and it occurs to me how funny it is that people can be afraid of something they don’t believe in. I decide to put on a show and my eyes roll as my body shakes, I briefly speak in tongues before affecting my voice with a texture it never normally has. I am now the spirit of a man who died tragically on set several years ago, and to many gasps and gawps I relate my story accusing the hosts of being responsible. An apparition in the shadows merely confirms what I’m relating and a cacophonous cameraman gives everybody a fright. The male host turns in to that nasty boy from my childhood and I get to watch his eyes well up as he’s lead away in chains.

I’m sitting in my bedroom with a glass snowball in my hands and it occurs to me that as the scene begins to shift I can see in to the future. My father walks through the door and I blurt out that the news from the hospital was bad and that it’s cancer isn’t it?With nodding confirmation he comforts me and tells me how everything will be OK but I know it won’t and why is he comforting me and not the other way around? His hand on my shoulder turns to ash as I look into his eyes and the cigarettes he smoked for fourty years start to fill up my room. The boy band posters on my walls stretch away and I grip the snow scene harder and harder until it becomes assimilated in to my hands. I want everything to be as it was and determine to live my life this way. My gift of fortune telling allows my father to never really die and for life to be as simple and carefree as when he was alive.

I’m dressed as a dominatrix riding a surfboard waving at passers by. I see the cliff in the distance and the blurred face is frantically trying to gain my attention. I ignore it, I have no need for that part of me anymore, and resolve to keep it as far away from my daughter as possible. As I begin to awaken my thoughts merge with the bleating radio and start to become led by it. I’m thrown in to a cabinet meeting with various dignitaries asking if anyone wants to ride the waves. Everything starts fading when it’s announced that a celebrity has sadly passed away and I knew this, I knew this before anything was said. My stomach starts to rumble and just before my eyes open I realise I will contact them at my next séance.

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