Spring is sprung and my senses are sent to the last time I stood in St. James’ Park. I look up, to the sky, a deep cavernous blue above me, and around me the world is bright with yellow light. How I have missed this; this liveliness, sun soaking and sorting my scattered psyche.
My skin prickles in the sunlight and I feel I am opening like a flower, stirring in the bright bursting breath of waking earth. So long it feels it has slumbered, sick. Like a child, now mended, it jumps from its bed.
My ear is drawn to the ducks around me, with geese become gluttonous. Workers words travel on the wind; all clad in thick grey suits, which hang unhappily under smile painted faces. All around us children run triumphantly, around in circles, sparking with electrical joy.
We are tightly packed, close together, a collective. Come to share ourselves with the spring; our feet walking in the histories of politicians, spies talking in hushed, clandestine tones, and the ecstasy of VE revellers finding their thrills in dark abandon, all under the eye of a Queen unseen.
Woolf’s spirit strides towards me, a Mrs Dalloway in her fine unknown adventure. My eyes follow her into the future, and my mind takes flight into the London beyond; all alive with spring and the sensation of the new.
I can see the possible paths stretch out before me; unseen, untested, unknown. Innumerable desire lines pull at me; forcing my feet forward. I turn my head and walk back the way I came. To seek a stranger I have been waiting all winter to find.
Throughout the Covid outbreak my writing teacher is keeping us going by setting us writing exercises set on specific word combinations. This is based on the words: mend, stranger, sky.
Unstuck Monsters 