.

4) 'The Quiet Pedestrian' (prose piece) - published in SOOP (short story anthology book) Oct 2020

Sockless in olive green jogging bottoms, pristine tennis shoes, an all white cigarette hanging limply from his mouth, the Quiet Pedestrian drags himself along the lonely pavement. His head garbed with a miner’s cap, collar spoilt with stale sweat, the Quiet Pedestrian is roughly twenty five, he looks a lot older.

7) 'Thoughts on a Common Walk'  - (prose piece/short story) 2000 words)

Published in Slimi Magazine - Aug 2020 

Note: This piece was initially written in note form in 2015 recovering from a major trauma, then written up and developed during the first lockdown in the UK

​The room is quiet. You can feel its silence. You lie on the bed and you look out the window. Above the blackened buds of the ash tree you see the rare beauty of a clear February sky. It’s late afternoon, more like early evening, and you become aware of the slowly fading light.

From the second-floor window, you watch the waning of another day and you feel dusk consume the precious anodyne light. You’re feeling commonplace and quite unremarkable. Your focus fades as the last vestige of a thought pattern turns into a ghost in the attic of your mind.

You ask yourself: ‘Are you going for a walk - you ought to go for a walk.’ 

Then… ‘A walk would be good for you’.

This pseudo discourse unravels, then just as it unfolded, it dissolves into muffled subconscious drivel. You are surprised to find yourself standing at the window, because you don’t remember how you got there. You are standing at the window in front of the old ash tree. You gradually begin rocking with a lazy rhythm and it feels good to shift your body weight as you rock from tiptoe to heel. Your focus flits and fizzles as you rock back and forth, back and forth. Time drifts out of reach. The light fades and you are comfortable with it. Your feelings float away, and you rock back and forth, back and forth to the lazy rhythm, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth till you blur.

Some time passes before your focus bends back to the clarity of vision. You see in the distance the westerly sky. It almost takes your breath away. The setting sun reflects off a passing passenger jet. The plane moves so slowly through the sky. You study it carefully. High in the sky the metal husk refracts the sunlight. A beam of light so clear and bright it is profound. For a second it feels like a ray of hope but it’s just a wink from the sun as it sets. The plane holds the sun’s glow for a little longer before it passes over the rooftops of neighbouring houses and out of sight.

You wonder if anyone else watches the plane as it stitches its vapour trail across the sky. You imagine how many passengers have looked through your bedroom window, peering down from thirty thousand feet into your gradually greying bedroom to catch your idle upward gaze.

You notice you’ve drifted back over to the bed, numb and inert, you’re still not walking. Looking back toward the window, the glass pane suspends the nibs of the old ash tree, the only vague lens you have on the outside world today. Through it you watch the feathered branches reach out, as if following the sun, and the tips of the tree dance like fairies tickled in the wind. Just out of frame, a pigeon languidly squats amidst the ash’s leafless branches. Contributing, in its own way, to an otherwise featureless suburban scene.

You’re sat on the bed. Your feet are cold. The skin feels hard and brittle. You’ve kept your socks off today. You’ve been meaning to clip your toenails, but for the past few days you’ve witnessed a form of procrastination you should be proud of. You decide to warm your woollen socks on the old reliable bar-heater. Deciding to clip your nails on returning from the walk.

The walk. Daylight fades. The sun sets and the dying light turns trees to shadows of the night.

You wrap yourself in an oversized scarf, partially for protection, and you feel confident you’re substantially prepared for a stroll; suitably dressed for the season. Then you curse yourself out loud. You curse the woollen socks resting on top of the heater. the indicator light is off and the plug rests nearby on the floor.

Tendrils of fog have replaced the wind and float with an eeriness only recognisable to the night. You look back to the window, a black mirror, and on seeing your blurry reflection, you’re reminded of how long you’ve been in the bedroom pickling through your superfluous dilemmas. Your bed entices another nap, but you bravely embrace the idea of exercise.

‘It will warm your feet’.

You commit to putting on your socks. You plug in the heater warming the bedroom for your return. You head downstairs, sure to switch off all the lights, you pull on your boots and you open the front door. The night is silent, not a soul stirs and you sense the familiar anxiety. The feeling of being alone, the beginnings of a walk.

The journey to recovery is solitary. The juxtaposition of haste clashing hesitation makes for a heady dosage of reality. The outside world awaits on the other side of every front door.

This particular walk is a set route measured at a brisk pace. Thirty minutes are usually allocated to pass by the large housing estate just around the corner, up the main road from the house, then a steep incline along a slow bend to travel north-west past a derelict property. Set into the hillside towering ornate features support abandoned turrets. A haunting structure standing ominously and out of sorts surrounded by dense overgrown woodland. The sort of place where you’d go to play as a child; avoid as an adult.

On this occasion, having braved the precipice of your front door, you’re furnished with unusual levels of curiosity and so decide to snoop. You partially climb one of the highwalls that perimeter the property to get a better look. You’re just able to see past a rusting wrought iron gate and are surprised to see a manicured lawn fringed by carefully trimmed hedges, the house however hovers in tatters. As you climb back down, you consider returning one afternoon to find a potential access point to further a future adventure.

The hill. As you climb the hill, passing the property, up towards the fields at the top of the road, you sense a deep appreciation for being outdoors. The fields are a high point, where you look across the land and feel a touch of the sublime: rewilded by nature. Here you often feel a palpable self-awareness, a form of intuition that comes only through nature, it takes the form of a physical sensation that’s encouraged by being outdoors. It contrasts the days you’ve been stewing away in an upstairs bedroom scuffling with your thoughts.

You decide to make a pledge to yourself. You pledge to take regular walks, just like you vowed to commit this ephemeral sensation to memory, because you know that to recover you must break free from domestic isolation and challenge the restrictions of your habitual existence.

You know once it’s over, when you’re back at the house, alone in the hours as the hours tick by, that a walk like this punctuates the days. Days that so effortlessly stack themselves on top of one another compiling sedentary chapters of the healing process. You know the rooms of the house are all alike, you know that only action can change the mood and composure of a space. You know where the messy desk meets your half-made bed, how the clothes are spread around the room. The collective comforts of organised chaos that constitute the shielded environment that offers you reassurance by way of familiarity.

When you walk you are part of the outdoors, as part of a natural relationship, you become a substantial part of something larger than your life and you are given a fresh unconsidered perspective. You become a transitory presence idling amidst a resolute yet ever-changing wilderness. At home in your room, you are merely a permanent fixture and there you patiently press on accepting the terms of your recovery moved only by the rare rearrangement of your psychological furniture.

The recovery process is initiated against your will. Being well and getting better are mutually exclusive so the trick is to rid yourself of victimisation and forgive yourself of your circumstances. Recovery is formed of many delicate interconnected steps. You learn that the true edge is not where you might choose to sit but where you are situated against your will.

There are more lessons to be learned than mistakes to be made during recovery. Recovering from trauma can be cruel like a brutal mistress holding up a mirror to your every desperate instinct. Trauma comes in two savage forms: limited choice or no other available option. Unfortunately, others tend to observe recovery through a critical lens. This however is not one of your many responsibilities.

The ubiquitous force of pain and the unfathomable imprint it can cast across each new day is measured on a scale of ‘manageable’ to ‘so profoundly unbearable that you pine for the white light to overcome you’. Waiting for the white before it induces the pain-free blackout. The mid-scale is marked by how quickly pills can be digested to how effectively pain can be managed. Exhaustion invokes sleep and sleep creates the welcome sedation of medicated dreams.

You take your medication and you stick to the dosage. You quietly serve your time. You stay out of trouble. You struggle to leave the house. You face the sheer certainty of your unpalatable truth, and day to day, you get by. You become acquainted with truth because you are forced to serve the truth if you want to heal. Day by day you get better. You display courage you never knew you had and persevere with tenacity at all times. Such characteristics become second nature as you begin to arm yourself to the teeth with newfound animal instinct.

You can walk so you must walk. You will walk. You will march ahead with the pride of those less fortunate than you. Stand for those forgotten. Those who have forgotten what it’s like to walk.

As you count your steps away from that front door within moments you are faced with all the world has to offer. All you have to do is try. You must confront yourself as part of the world around you. Through the dusky stillness, the half-dark world envelopes you and will gently creep back into your soul.

Whilst you walk you encounter the briefest of moments. A nod shared with a passer-by. The semi-engagement of a token greeting. Smiling at a baby in a pushchair or petting a friendly dog as it sidles up to you. These encounters encompass the potency of being a stranger in public. The hushed courtesies we extend one another as we go about our daily business. Children’s faces against the passenger window, animated expression seen through a haze of perspiration, all crammed into mum’s car as she chatters into the rear-view mirror with an eye on the traffic ahead. The bored children of the backseat, who analyse pedestrians from the safety of slow-moving traffic. Or just a fellow pedestrian who crosses your path a little too close for comfort. The mutually expressed awkwardness that impregnates something so familiar.

Or the sad old lady, always at the same window, at the same hour every day, staring at the same point, saying the rosary. The five sorrowful mysteries. Perhaps focusing on something only she’ll ever know.

There’s an unspoken acknowledgement among all earthly creatures. The collective aura created by strangers acting autonomously yet existing simultaneously. They make up the shared personality of our world. You’d do well to remember the quirks and qualities of all the different characters so frequently over-looked as backdrop during a single day. The way they fuss and frenzy over material belongings that have no meaningful value other than to pose as statements of financial worth and the cravings of attention in the competition for class status and social gain. Symbols of rewarded success through lengthy measures. The chintz and tat that thrives on economic trends and consumer psychology. The masquerade of glory and the behavioural sciences at its core. The kitsch that garnishes people’s lives. The doped sentimentality you see when you look through their window. People’s homes and private lives. Curtains not yet drawn to the oddball observer or the potential intruder. You’re just another passer-by navigating your route through recovery on a common walk.

Without the ability to leave the house, without making an effort to try, life soon becomes an excerpt. A habitual tapestry of interior existence. Days punctuated by a relationship with prescription drugs as profoundly intimate as human solitude; and at times equally as sublime.

Life can be such a flirt. Life will break your heart every which way home if you give it a chance. And so, you must resolve to forge your own way forward. Grit your teeth and beat your tiny pathway against the abyss of time. Release yourself, wash away the fear, take your recovery on yet another journey along the ley lines of a solitary walk.

The scenic route is always worth taking. There is nothing on earth comparable to a breath of fresh air. For it deepens the texture of life experience. Reminding us that life lives on under the surface of everyday things.

Scott Temple
scotttemp@gmail.com
insta: @scotttemple_
twitter: @stemple_