Last night I remembered that I used to write stories from five or six unrelated words when I was very little. I thought it’d be fun to start doing that again. My friend Ruth Cameron gifted me the following words via Insta ( @elke_writes ): heart, tree, magic, ladder, sandwich.
I just wrote the following short story:
She grinned. Even though she was nearly five decades old, she still had such a soft spot for Calvin & Hobbes, the mischievous little cartoon boy and his very real imaginary tiger, who used every opportunity to hide behind trees and pounce on his unsuspecting friend, making him jump and spill his lunch everywhere. She chuckled, and wondered if real tigers actually like tuna sandwiches? Or is it just the ones of the imaginary kind?… Then another image popped into her head. What did they say again when they sat under that vast canopy of stars? She remembered the image vividly, but failed to recall the words. Ah yes, it was:
“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I bet they’d live a lot differently.” – “How so?” – “Well, when you look into infinity, you realise that there are more important things than what people do all day.”
So true. Or at least it is, if you, like her, stopped following your heart somewhere along the way and started doing what you thought you should be doing, rather than what you love and see where it takes you. Yes, you guessed it – ‘she’ is me. Why is that? Why DID I start ignoring my soul? Why – and when – DID I stop believing in myself? When did I start talking myself small rather than raising myself up? And how did I end up in this hole? I take a deep breath. I don’t know. But I am so very grateful that I have noticed. Because now I can change everything. I can start looking up and see all this beautiful light rather than just stare straight ahead and blindly keep digging into that dark hole. I now have a plan… I will build myself a ladder. A ladder made of words and joy and love and soul and pictures and laughter and skinny dips, and I will climb out of that hole, all the way up into that magical sky.
Wanna come? Let’s go!
08/01/2024 © Elke Thompson
Published on Jan 14, 2024