[Mon Jan 13 20:20:08
1997]From: Dust and Dreams and Broken Glass (lanfear)
[Mon Jan 13 20:20:08
1997]
From: Dust and Dreams and Broken Glass (lanfear)
I am a chameleon. I can be what you want me to be. Tell me and I fade to your colours, like a mirror reflecting the shifting shades of your mind. I will be what you expect me to be, and you will look no further than the portrait of yourself with the flaws removed, no further than the image of yourself you can see in my eyes.
But you, you see further. The mirror I give you is flat but you see me in three dimensions and sometimes I flee the breaking of the glass. When you expect me to be myself there is nowhere else to run. But still I wait for you to tell me what is the self to reflect back in my eyes.
[Tue Jan 14 16:02:13 1997]
From: Dust and Dreams and Broken Glass (lanfear)
Subject:
He is the colours of winter sunlight. Sun on bare branches, the faded grey-greens of the sleeping grass. The reds and oranges still seen in the few dry leaves that still cling to the trees, stark against the clear sky.
Winter sunlight. Look up and the sky goes on forever, like a horizon that never ends. Like the sky that is in his eyes, like the winter twilight when the colours drain and it hovers between blue and grey and lavender, still unclouded.
He is the winter sunlight, reflected to me in its subtle shades and sharp contrasts like the complex colours of his mind. But he is more precious to me than ever winter sunlight could be.
[Mon Jan 27 21:53:25
1997]
From: Dust and Dreams and Broken Glass (lanfear)
Subject: Present
Throw it away, Sarah. Why don't you just break everything you value and be done with it?
Why?
Broken glass in trembling fingers. Crystal in shards in the dust. One day it will be everything and still I don't know why.
[Mon Feb 10 01:10:05 1997]
From: A Shadow's Dream of Moonlight (lanfear)
Subject: Sometimes you see how thin the veneer is.
I used to think that at least some of my friends were sane. Now I'm not so sure. Am I the sanest of us? Or do you just make me that by your own actions?
I watch people break and become something that is not them and bang their heads against the wall or a tray or whatever happens to be there and do you know what I feel? Tired. Impatient. Pitying. And that is all. And I wonder whether they'd do that if there was noone there to stop them.
That's unfair, and I know it is. You can't judge something like that because you don't know how they feel inside. But there was a time I wouldn't even have thought it, but have crowded close with wordless sympathy like the others. I've grown cynical, and if that's what I've become it's because of what I've seen, and what I've been through.
And I've never once broken in public. Three friends spent an evening with me arriving only minutes after I'd put down the knife, with death still in my heart, and they never knew. A mask so complete that the best of my friends cannot see behind it. In all my life only one person ever has.
And so what I really feel when I watch is a kind of contempt at the self-indulgent antics, even though I KNOW that I should feel sympathy, and I should understand you because I too know what it is to have an enemy I can't fight. And perhaps also I feel jealousy at the love and sympathy you get that I so desperately want but would never ask for, would never break for no matter how much I needed it, because I never have.
Try it from my side. And then we'll see.
[Sun Feb 16 21:00:49 1997]
From: A Shadow's Dream of Moonlight (lanfear)
Subject: Present
He brings the sunlight with him.
Or, no. Not sunlight, but candlelight. Small points of light floating on the water and the warm glow of the room and the feel of velvet and the scent of him. Wine and talk and intimacy and kneeling by his chair with my head against his shoulder and our arms around each other and my body hurting for his touch.
And it was St Valentine's Day that I really lost my virginity, whatever may have happened in July. And it was worth it. So much worth it.
[Wed Feb 19 12:55:41 1997]
From: A Shadow's Dream of Moonlight (lanfear)
Subject: Present
I wondered, today, what the point was. The point of getting up, returning to the dreary round of work and the world where there was nothing for me. The point of life without happiness.
I wish I hadn't. Despair. Hopelessness. A desperate longing for release.
NO. Stubborn, stubborn. Stubborn enough? There's a part of me that hopes so. But I can see no end, oh no end to this and why fight where there is no hope of victory?
Because I'm stubborn, at bedrock. Because I can. But it's lonely here inside me, so lonely where the light doesn't reach.
[Wed Feb 19 23:33:40 1997]
From: Waiting for the Shadow-Lover (lanfear)
Subject: Stubborn but tired.
I can't see an end and I won't take the obvious one. Marks on my wrist where the nails dug in, but no other outward sign of my agony. Look across at me and you will see the mask of me smiling, while inside there is nothing.
Exhaustion. Frustration. Tired hopeless crying that goes on and on where nobody hears.
I'm frightened and alone and this is killing me, everything I am and have tried to be, and there's nothing anyone else can do about it.
But I'll smile across at you anyway, when you look at me. Because I can.
[Sun Mar 2 19:04:45
1997]
From: Dreaming the Rising Wind (lanfear)
Subject: Present.
Wondering. Thinking. Readjusting in mind. An acknowledgement that the scars may be with me forever, but that does not mean the memory will always sear. The wound is healed now.
A weight that a word could slip from me, a self poised to move in a new direction. Forward.
A nexus of uncertainties in my life. The place where the past comes to a point and I balance and I fall and I fly again, wonderment in my eyes and my wings are silver and gold. Too long, too long. And I am myself again.
I cast my soul on the wind and on moonlight but still try to bring it back to me. Fearing to fall fully into love, waiting poised for Nuada to pull away from me. Loving him. Fearing him.
But strong again, at last, after all these months. Living.
[Mon Mar 3 13:43:05
1997]
From: Dreaming the Rising Wind (lanfear)
Subject: Strange dreams.
Some last night, some Saturday when I should have been safe. I don't know why.
I had killed someone. I'm not sure who, or why, or how much it was accidental, but everyone I knew was mourning their death. And they wouldn't believe that it was my fault and I wanted them to because couldn't they see that I was a danger, that I didn't deserve them all?
A dream of two conversations, one proving the other a lie. Impossible in life but reverberating somewhere.
I had gone somehow mad. Hurting people, wanting to kill them but really it was not them or anger, but something that went far deeper. They wanted to kill me in return,and I could not blame them. Unseeing through tears I was saved by a stranger who took me to a plane/train/bus on which was only one other person, someone looking sometimes like Lugh and sometimes like Nuada. A fighter pilot in a war that was happening now, scarred deep and bitter by death. They would train us to fly together and we would love somehow and save evrything. He was silent and I could not stop crying, biting my wrist and a taste of blood.
Rabbits from Watership Down. There were others and we could not defeat them, and I knew they would kill some of us, and which ones, and I tried to save them but I was wrong and they left only a few alive. Men with guns and I offered them a bargain. My life for theirs. The first shot went wide and beside me another friend died. And they pointed the gun and I did not flinch but held my head high and this shot hit me square and there was no pain. They kept their bargain.
[Mon Mar 10 00:12:16 1997]
From: Threads of Dark Weaving (lanfear)
Subject: Descent
Do I look better to you? Do I look like I'm coping, like I'm coming out of all this with my strength intact to be the bringer of joy that I have been, that I can be? To be the healer I said I was?
But inside it's worse than it ever was before. More tangled and knotted and twisted together too tightly to ever unravel. I'm falling now, maybe slowly, but this time I don't think anything will stop me. I'm no longer sure that there's anything in the bloody mess inside of me that's worth saving.
I promised myself I would no longer look outside myself to be saved. That I wouldn't rely on any other to hold me up, but I think I lied.
Where does love cross the boundary into obsession, and which side of the line am I on? Am I capable of anything pure, anything healthy anymore?
Promises I made to Agravaine already broken. I knew when I made them, I think. The uncrossable void between the promise made to reassure and the pain inside that needs an outlet. Shame. Shock. A border crossed and can I ever get back on your side?
Need, sternly denied. Stand on your own. You're going to have to one day. But need all the same and there only seems to be one other outlet.
And so I'm falling and I'm no longer worth all your time, all your caring, if I ever was. So much support and I still can't hold. Why should any of you bother anymore?
[Wed Mar 26 12:13:33
1997]
From: Threads of Dark Weaving (lanfear)
Subject: Last night I dreamed of playing the violin.
I dreamed that I wanted to learn again, even almost from the beginning as it was so long since I had last played, and I woke with regret that I had ever given it up.
It's too late now, though, really, and I know I haven't the willpower to stay the course any more than I did last time, when in laziness and frustration I threw away my talent.
But it was good to dream of that new beginning.
[Wed Apr 9 15:36:51 1997]
From: IAmYourConscienceAndIWishIDidControlYou (lanfear)
Subject: I am a goddess.
I am the fire in the heart of the emerald and you can never capture me. I am desire and I will wreath your heart in flames and ice if only you look at me. Give me an hour and you will be mine to toss aside and my laughter is all you will live for. You love me already in the deepest recesses of your soul.
I am a goddess.
It's important to remember that.
All you ever need to do is believe.
[Thu May 1 09:58:26 1997]
From: The World Had Made You Sweet (lanfear)
Subject: I want to be talking to Nuada.
I feel there are things we need to say, though I know not what they are. My poem is a true one, he told me, and I need to know if he means by that what I half-want, half-dread him to mean.
Change. Freedom is flying out into the raging storm and, buffeted and hurt and cold and yearning for safety again, flying on into sunlight. That is what freedom is, and how few of you want it! You think you are free but you have bound yourself in magic chains and turned to face the mirror and never looked down to Camelot.
Nuada, my sweet one, hold me. Bind me. Free me.
[Sun May 11 18:57:54 1997]
From: The World Had Made You Sweet (lanfear)
Subject: What makes us so superior?
That's at least in part what turned me away from Christianity, and certainly what turned me away from the rest of the human race. What makes us so superior that we have the right to do what we please with any other creature?
No, I'm not a vegetarian, although at times I've wished I could be. But the kill and the taste of meat are not a part of nature I would wish to ignore, and natural to us as well. that is not what I meant.
What gives us the right to drown unwanted puppies? To irrevocably twist the minds of intelligent apes to see how they work? To imprison the sea creatures who have an intellect comparable to ours?
Ther is an attitude, that we are always superior to they, that they matter less. Why? Language? But we can teach the chimps to speak, and all that keeps them from 'language' is our redefining it to keep it out of their grasp. How we must hate to lose our pedestal. Love? Yet animals can show true affection where human psychopaths cannot, and still we value them first. Intelligence? There are mentally retarded people with less understanding than the apes or the dolphins, yet still we accord them the privileges we withold from their betters.
Do you dislike that word, 'betters'? Ask yourself why it disquiets you so much, then. Because you don't want to lose your supremacy either, do you, however much you might profess otherwise. Pride will be our undoing.
Only ants and humans wage war on their own kind. Is our one outstanding trait really a virtue?
[Tue May
13 13:50:25 1997]
From: The World Had Made You Sweet (lanfear)
Subject: There is a world out there that you will never know.
A world that is far more than you can ever comprehend and drives you into insignificance like a shredding leaf on the wind when you realise that you are no more than that, that you will live and you will die in a heartbeat of the stars and be lost like the autumn leaves you kick up in your wake.
The mountains will rise and fall and all that remembers you will be forgotten too in its passing, falling in the changeless winds of change, making way for the new and the old as it always has done, falling to sand and earth and the grass growing over it bending in the breeze.
You are nothing, as we all are, as everything is. And you are everything because behind that knowledge the world is beautiful, so beautiful and so great, and because you know it doesn't matter you can do anything. Because nothing has the power to bind you anymore and you are free. You will always be free.
[Tue May 13 15:43:39 1997]
From: The World Had Made You Sweet (lanfear)
Subject: I remember when Simon died.
Some of you knew Simon, some of you didn't. Some of you still talk to him on occasion. But Simon is dead.
I counted him as one of my best friends, one of those few who I turn to when I need, the few who can hold me, and there were times I held him as well. I knew him though I had never met him, and I loved him as I love those my friends, fierce and protective and strong. But Simon is dead.
I remember the day they told me, on my return here after the summer. They didn't break it to me gently but with anger and condemnation of his killer, and I walked out into the night in shock and grief and horror. Horror because Simon isn't dead.
He isn't dead but I talk to his killer every day, a killer who is my friend but not as Simon was, never the same, and that's strange because he is Simon. Because Simon Hawkins never existed for me to love the way I did. Because he was a fiction given life and at the last his creator took it away again.
Simon is dead. I will miss him forever.
[Wed May 14 13:50:49 1997]
From: The World Had Made You Sweet (lanfear)
Subject: Thoughts
What would Simon have said had he known what he was, or had it been a different friend of mine who had never lived? I might ask him.
[Sun May 18 10:20:19 1997]
From: The World Had Made You Sweet (lanfear)
Subject: The air has turned to blood.
I scream in darkness, choking.
Not yet. Here I am calm. But the nightmare is approaching. You never did guess why, last time, did you? But I know, and so I wait. But I am stronger now than I was, and I know this; that all things pass.
[Sat May 24 19:06:54 1997]
From: The Shadowdancer (lanfear)
Subject: An implicational structure of systems of semantically connected propositions.
That was the clearest sentence in Fodor's 'Modularity of Mind'.
Apart from the bit about the man-eating tigers, of course.
[Thu May 29 13:09:25 1997]
From: The Shadowdancer (lanfear)
Subject: Finals start on Saturday morning.
I'm frightened.
[Thu May 29 23:22:10 1997]
From: The Shadowdancer (lanfear)
Subject: Other frightening things.
They have eight legs and scuttle.
The world is full of perils to arachnophobes. There are the ones with the small bodies and legs that spread out forever, the round furry-looking ones pressed against the wall as if to spring, the bulky black ones with large bodies who sit menacingly in the corner of your eye, and for me also even the six-legged things that fly at your face.
But of all these different kinds one thing is agreed. The worst kind of spider, the very worst, is the kind that's sitting on your wall.
[Tue Jun 10 19:46:19 1997]
From: //;;\\ They're Coming For Me! //;;\\ (lanfear)
Subject: Now they really are coming for me.
One sits on my wall. There is a friend in the room but I wonder what I would have done alone, having thrown last matchbox out of the window in terror. I therefore pick up matchbox and bring it inside.
Eight-legged scuttling in matchbox only a few centimetres from my fingers.
I seem to recall screaming and jumping furniture in my desperate need to get away, leaving Lugh to cope with removal of two scuttling creatures who, by his account, rival Houdini.
One of them is still in my room. Somewhere.
Ironic that I wrote an essay on treatment of phobias this morning, innit?
[Sat Jun 21 00:20:42 1997]
From: Honour is like the Hawk (lanfear)
Subject: Hmm.
How does one reconcile believing in 'justice, vengeance and killing the bastards' with a total rejection of 'never apologise, never explain'?
The wolf within me rises and takes the sun in its teeth. Chains of steel can never bind me, and only the woven silk of your dreams and memories holds me now.
The wolf within me snarls and blood spurts between his tearing teeth. But above the wind rises and the moon sails uncaring in the cold night. Do you see, do you see? Because the night goes on forever where we fight beneath the stars and there is no right here but only the rage and the blood.
That is what the wolf knows that we have forgotten. There is no hatred but only what must be in this night between the stars. And I am the wolf.
[Thu Jun 26 10:07:26 1997]
From: Honour is like the Hawk (lanfear)
Subject: Last night I dreamed.
I dreamed that I had become something I could never wish to be, and wept heartbroken at the change. I fear to follow in the steps of the Wolf lest my balance be overturned and I become that which I dreamed. I do not know that he would mind. I would.
I am the self that sees me, and I am the self that is seen. I am the force that changes me and the me that is changed. But which is it who enters the sacred grove at the last?
[Fri Jun 27 21:04:17 1997]
From: Honour is like the Hawk (lanfear)
Subject: Farewell again, Slinker.
I suppose I must again watch Simon die, if Bateleur would have it so. The Ace of Spades. The Devil's Card. Fitting that it should be you.
Simon, you are right. In the final analysis you will always win, through what you were, your caring heart, and the love I will always bear you. I half-loved you once...
I remember when Simon died. It was today. Happy birthday.
[Thu Jul 10 17:41:07 1997]
From: Honour is like the Hawk (lanfear)
Subject: It was in weather just like this, a year ago today.
That was the last day of my childhood.
Innocence bubbled through me
Clear water from the spring
Which tempered the fires of summer in your eyes.
Water flowed through me
Like you within my veins
When I loved you long before you made me wise
On the last day of childhood.
That was the day my innocence died.
Your skin hot against me
That I worshipped with my touch
As I dreamed the dreams of summer lust repaid
But a shadow claimed my hope
As you whispered on your way
And I clutched to my breast my shattered trust betrayed
On the day my innocence died.
That summer my heart was broken.
A void curled within me
Shame and anger biting
To find the place the words you'd whispered lied.
But I could not.
Crying in the night
Holding onto the shreds of dismembered pride
In the summer my heart was broken.
And should I tell, should I tell, who would hear me?
My voice is like the wind, and loving you I stay
Those words that I would say
Will I never find a way
To bring us home?
In autumn was the last that I knew you.
My soul was crumbling
In a chaos of ethics
And the truth was the only way out I could find.
I begged your mercy
But your heart so bitter
That you killed me because you had cast me aside
The day that I last knew you.
It was spring before I took my revenge.
Unheeded and outcast
I brooked your lies no more
And forgot that he who now threatened, once I had loved.
I hurt you.
And I wished I could forgive
But my soul was lost in darkness and the light too far above
On the day I took my revenge.
And should I tell, should I tell, who would hear me?
My voice is like the wind, and loving you I say
Those words that I should stay
Will I never find a way
To bring us home?
This day is the first of my life.
Will I ever find the way
To bring us home?
[Fri Nov 28 17:24:37 1997]
From: Wind Walks Lonely (lanfear)
Subject: And oh yes, the Wadham Bop.
Last Saturday, Wadham had its yearly S&M bop - entry fee reduced for those dressed 'appropriately'.
Having never had the confidence to do so in the past, I decided to force myself to do what I usually hate, and expose the shameful thing that is my body...
Um. Small black negligee (often referred to as 'the negligible'), lacy black knickers. Collar and chain, studded leather on my wrists, high-heeled black boots with fur around the top.
People's reactions were ...interesting. I don't think I've ever had quite so many offers in my life! Good thing the police didn't spot me though...
