WRITING WA | INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY 2025
1 min
Extract from String theory by Alison Middleton
Writing WA
Her fingers dance even in sleep. Have done since she was little. Always curious, desperate to touch, feel, understand.
Tugging something closer. No, not something. Someone.
Fate, some would say. Predestined. She wouldn't say that. She'd use words like lonely, lost, and frustrated. Taking too long.
I was there, wrapped around her heart, when she climbed under her kitchen table at midnight on New Year's Eve and ate twelve grapes, wishing for love to find her.
I guided her hand as she scribbled true love on a dried bay leaf and burned it on the night of a full moon. Wrote a list of all the qualities that she wanted in a partner in her journal, longing trickling down into her stomach like fire.
She often dreamed of him. Felt the calluses on fingertips as they stroked her abdomen and pulled her closer, his warm breath and curve of a smile teasing the nape of her neck.
What I remember most is the feeling of her sinking, joyful surrender. Feeling safe enough to relinquish the carefully cultivated safeguards nurtured through failed relationships and broken hearts, polite smiles and awkward dates.
Emotional rope burns graze painfully in the places where I've pulled her away from the type of love that isn't love at all because it hurts more than it heals.
Until today, when with one final, momentous wrench, they collide on a street corner, her errant scarf an apt metaphor as it dances on the wind, just out of reach.
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