In A Parallel Universe…

HH1Being in Hampstead always makes me thoughtful. It is a place I associate with wonderful happiness, but also traumatic events from the night I was attacked. While we were walking their dogs across the Heath (a place which is particularly poignant for me), I chatted with my friends (Liam and Holly) today about everything that has happened with Jack.

I looked at Teresa’s prompt early this morning before I went up to Hampstead for the day:

Your challenge today, should you accept it, is to explore the flipside and write your best Science Fiction Alternate/Parallel Universe tale and see where it leads…or whatever/wherever the picture takes you.

https://maplesswanderer.wordpress.com/2020/01/26/daily-writing-prompt-26/

I interpreted this as the kind of scenario from the Gwyneth Paltrow movie “Sliding Doors“. My head is too heavy to make up a tale, so I have opted for more bad poetry! My awful poetry is steadily advancing from worse to worse!

Street, Pavement, Urban, Building, OldThe picture Teresa supplied us with made me think of the cobbled lane where I crossed paths with Jack late last summer. I remember coming home that day and writing about it in this post called That Was Me. Within a fortnight, Jack made contact with me. I wrote about that too, I Will Never Ignore My Phone Again, and the rest is history.

But I asked Jack a question during one of our deep conversations. I asked if he had not seen me that day when we both happened to be on the same cobbled lane in North London, would he have called me. He said no, he wouldn’t have. Seeing me reignited his desire to heal the breach, to end the silence. He had wanted to for a long time, but as silence persists, things become more awkward.

estFor a long time, he didn’t know how and when to contact me. I had changed my phone number, I had moved several times, I had stopped using my old email address. I had asked those of my close friends who knew my contact details not to give them out and not to tell Jack where I was living. But after seeing me that day, he went straight to Liam and Holly (who I was with today) and told them how he felt about the silence between us. Liam and Holly gave him my number. I am glad they did, even though I had previously asked them not to.

Anyway…sometimes I think about that film “Sliding Doors” and how things may have ended up very differently. What if Jack and I had not been on the same cobbled lane that day? What if I hadn’t have changed my plans? What if I had been walking along that lane five minutes earlier, or five minutes later? I have expressed some of my thoughts in the terrible “poem” below!

In a parallel universe there’s another me

She’s wandering blindly through her life, lost as can be

In her heart a battle wages, hope against despair

Always pretending, she hides away her anxious care

 

Her lover in Australia, felt so far away

She’d been with him all summer, but knew she couldn’t stay

She’ll work overtime in the hope she can see him soon

Saving every penny to afford a flight next June

 

Not a word from Jack, her ex-flatmate, these past four years

No one she can confess her pain to or share her tears

Fearing family or friends that might blow her cover

Can’t blame her clinging to her long distance lover

 

With Goldfinch’s arms around her Caramel escaped

Suppressing the memories from that night she was raped

Will he ever understand how he helped her to heal?

How he made love, joy, peace and hope become something real?

 

However, I think she knew from that very first kiss

Goldfinch was reluctant to make her any promise

Although she may have dreamed of one day being his wife

She knows that we don’t always get what we want in life

 

Her realizing things could be an awful lot worse

Helps her be content with her place in the universe

Don’t forget this is about the other Caramel

I’m just imagining the make-believe parallel

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s