MOMENTS

It is like having an extremely valuable volume, exquisitely bound in gold and told that it contained the most exciting and fascinating story but when you come to open it you find you cant because you haven't been given the key. This is you my friend, - married, removed permanently from my life. An acceptance by myself that is calm and intelligent and ultimately will become a very dear precious memory.

But I am as firm as a jelly or a marshmallow and while I wallow in the enchantment of what could have been in another time, another place or dimension, I see a vital part of my life in a way that defies description of any such inadequate term as friendship. I am fragile as the little pigs' house of straw, locked in timeless space with the painful instinct and knowledge that is drilled into my head that this is not real.

So now, as I pretend to be strong, brave and fearless, to be self-contained, needing no one and always separated, I realise that a safe distance means that I am never rejected, never disappointed, never left. Nothing given, nothing risked and ultimately expecting nothing. I am trapped in a steel boxed mind endlessly plagued in soul and spirit, denying myself peace. I'm in the dark underbelly of life or perhaps this is the little death.

Ann Phillips 2006