Puzzles and Poems

I hear her from outside the Church door. Shuddering, wrapped in winter clothing leant listening against the door, entranced, and when it opens I fall in, colliding with her onto the ground, crazed, entwined with one another. Woollen hat sails across the room, coated in snow brought in on the sharp wind that blows in, in from the bitter Winter once kept at bay by the door I stumble through.

On the ground with me, the poem I had fallen for, crumpled, folded up. Desperate, my gloves smooth her out, pale parchment, and hand her back to the woman who had been reading her. The poem is unfinished, I notice, work in progress.

“Sorry, sorry.” I’m blushing. “I didn’t mean to clatter through, I just- well, you know, I heard you talking through the door and I was entranced and well-” I tail off, breathless glowing red. The woman clutching the poem – Linda, I’d later know her well – smiles at me. She’s the leader of a writing group, this writing group I’ve stumbled into. The poem that I’d fallen head-over-heels for is her own glorious creation. She was reading it to her class; today’s lesson is on the artform of poetry. I am welcome to stay if I wish.

But it isn’t for me. Writing – I have always liked the idea, but it is beyond my reach. I had studied maths in my younger years. Calculus, algebra, these are my fortes, so I have been told. Not writing, language, prose and metre, the wonderful objectivity of art constantly evolving with each artist daring enough to approach it. I am out of my depth even just listening, entranced by Linda’s poetry. No hope I would be able to write any of my own.

I thank Linda, scurry through her writing class and deeper into the Church. Many a hobby is practiced and loved within these walls, little cubbies and rooms filled with painters and bird-watchers.

Onto my puzzle group I go. That’s my hobby of choice. A room at the back of the Church, darker, chilly, faces wrapped in hoods and snoods with eyes watering, staring. This is where I belong, safe, secure, happy in my practical puzzling. Clear instructions, you see. That’s what I need, and the puzzles they give it to me – direction, answers, rights and wrongs. GCHQ puzzles some of them, difficult – tough lateral thinking required to achieve the correct answer. But correct, always, eventually correct, no ifs or buts. The undefinable excitement and passion of writing – delirious simply in its own existence, too much for me.

And yet, a week later… It’s colder now, proper Winter-time and I’m walking back along the frozen streets of dark ice and shivering from the cold, nerves. Approaching the Church, blowing into hands, keep the fingers limber. It’s Wednesday, and yet my puzzle class has moved to Thursday evenings now at the request of a few shivering snood-wearers tied up in other activities.

Glacial outbreaths and sharp inbreaths, faster now as I stumble hectic into the writing session again, frozen toes and white flecked hat, feigning ignorance – “You say the puzzle class has moved days? Huh- well, now I’m here I guess maybe I’ll join you, if that’s okay? Don’t have anything else to do.” I’m sure they saw through my flimsy excuse. But they welcomed me into their embrace, orange glow from candles warming the minds of these auteurs, with open arms, a shelter from the bitter cold.

But alas, the weeks progress and it isn’t to be. Despite my best hopes, I was right in my puzzle practicality. The frozen months take themselves out on me, frozen ideas, stagnant, unable to write from the heart, frozen too. Writing and I don’t get on, we never could and never will. Opposites attracting isn’t working in this instance – I want to write, desperately want to, grasping at any respite from the bone-chill. But it isn’t for me. A novel once started in those warm classes I went to, now stuffed away in a drawer, idle and icy, dust-covered. My puzzle class reverts back to a Wednesday and I have to choose, puzzling or writing. Cannot be both. Easy decision.

THE FOLLOWING AUTUMN

I bump back into Sam – I recognise her from the writing group I attended last Winter, she was always breathless, words streaming from her as sprinted through stories like a 100-metre dash, red-faced. Red-haired now, dyed it after she turned 30, she explains. It matches the trees, the leaves this time of year, now falling and desperately escaping to the ground or the wind, desperate to be anywhere but home on the branch.

Her writing is coming on wonderfully – Sam’s. A natural poet, even in conversation like this. Wild, she splutters, moulding great phrases and metaphors to the contours of ears, her soul bare at all times. A contrast to me. I could never be so brave.

It’s then my turn to talk, though I feel unworthy. By this point, my puzzling isn’t really satisfying me any longer. I tell her we had parted ways a little over a month ago, puzzling and riddling going one way and me another. The passion gone.

My job is great – I ramble on to Sam – I was always destined to be an accountant with maths laid bare, beautiful in its absolution on the page. That’s the control I crave, I need, finite and absolute. I would always find it in the puzzles, brain teasers or testers or torturers. Working to a final correctness, unquestionable. Control.

And yet…  

It still isn’t satiating me. The accounting job, the now distant memory of riddles once so engaging to me. Something is missing. I don’t think I can find it – I’ve hurled myself into new hobbies, frenzied weekends of stamp collecting at car boots or markets, card games in backs of pubs, weasel eyes trying to not give away my hand, spotting trains in the early morning with orchestras of finches and chaffinches.

But none of them worked, they didn’t satisfy me – Sam smiles as I realise I am just speaking at her, wild-eyed telling her all of this, my loveless-ness, life lacking stimulation. She hasn’t gotten a word in edgeways since I started. She invites me back to the writing class at the Church, taking pity on me I suppose. “There is always space there for you to come back. It sounds like you need a spark.” A spark, yes.

So, I go back, trudge through piles of leaves and brisk winds, not cold as such but the heat of Summer has certainly now faded and a peacoat is appropriate attire. Trudging back there, for weeks on end, searching again for the spark but still the beauty of writing eludes me. Though my heart is softer than during that first numbing encounter last year in the stinging anger of winter, the writing still doesn’t flow. My novel becomes desperate, a stream of trying-to-write as others around me channel the conscious and sub-conscious, muses wherever they happen to glance. They don’t try, they do.

Inspired, the beauty of words, their cadence, alliteration and assonance. Harmonies between the rhymes of lines of poetry, dissonance forming harsh contrast. This is all still far from my grasp, and I have no right to any of it. I am unskilled, unrefined, careless – yet I still adore the idea, the dream of writing. Weeks of writing my forlorn novel bleed once again into months, my mind racing and trying to keep up with other wonderous writers that surround me. But still it isn’t to be.

And more than that, the writing sessions are jam packed now, the Church room close to bursting with competitions for poetry and short stories and flash fiction entered by dozens of vicarious scribblers of prose and poetry, thoughts unable to be reached by me flowing through onto their pulp, their canvas. I have no chance, no comparison to them. Too casual for this crowd. I don’t deserve the pen.

I am suited to puzzling. I lay with the practical, the definable. The anarchy and chaos of words and the art was lost on me. I am suited to riddling, with answers and a finish. And so, I crawl back to her: riddles, puzzles. The novel is once again abandoned in the dusty drawer and now red-brown leaves are shaken off the snoods of those in that dark back room of the Church, puzzlers like me.

THE FOLLOWING SUMMER

I meet Linda again. I have to wander through her class to get to my puzzle group this week – Church repairs. She stops me, smiling again. I tried to avoid her, but she senses I need her. She reads me her poem, the one I fell in love with over a year ago and I’m transported back there, back to my snow-coated hat and gloves. And yet the poem is different now, evolved, and Linda turns to me and tells me that she has finally finished it after all this time. The poem I fell in love with back then, now complete in it’s glory and it’s more beautiful than even that first love-drenched encounter.

And I suddenly “get it”, I get writing, the poetry sings to me. It is simply itself, no pretence, no end or beginning. Just ideas, ideas that form and flow take shape until suddenly you feel the heavy weight of pure inspiration coming closer to the forefront of your mind euphoric, and all that is left is to make that journey from pen to paper as your soul bursts free.

A train achingly turning the corner as it barrels past golden-green fields towards summer time, sun high, kids dragging parents to beaches for day-trips crying with joy as they at long last spot the locomotive in the distance, their ticket to paradise for the sweltering day now approaching them all, making sense at last, finally tangible, the chattering of railway tracks rumbling through their hearts as the reality of the best day they’ll ever have now becomes clearer and more glorious than they ever imagined it could be, once simply a dream due to arrive at 10:52, 10:51 now and the fantasy of the hot sand is screaming towards them and will be true in a moment.

I stay for the writing session, forgoing my puzzle group, and read Linda’s poem again and again until fit to burst from motivation. And I start writing again. But this time for real.

My job takes a back seat, feverishly writing at any opportunity. These classes in the Church become a part of me with my breathlessness now matching Sam’s each week, shuddering as I trip over my words frantic to spill them all to the group of likeminded writers. Linda watches, listens with intent, a master of her page, her poem clutched to her chest, a world she inhabits so completely for a short while as our creativity bursts forth.

There is a competition coming up in a few months – one category is for first time novels, unpublished. A few very well-respected writers on the panel of judges. It’s been over a year and a half since I first stumbled into this Church, frozen stiff. Now I finally feel like I am becoming a writer, thawed and matching the joyous artists who surround me. The Church door now opens onto the street, letting the heat of summer out and the inspiration in.

But for now, I don’t think I’ll enter the competition. My novel, it’s- it’s not ready yet, it won’t be, no not ready for a competition – my fellow writers laugh at me when I hectically suggest someone else would be a better entrant – believe in yourself they all yell, ecstatic and lifting me up to meet them, imbuing me with their confidence.

Fine. Fine, I’ll – I’ll try. I work with all my heart on the novel. Summer is passing fast; the solstice has gone and I stay up all night to work during the fading hours of sun I can grasp until – the novel is done, it’s finished. Linda is proud, darting through the writing group beaming telling everyone. Me, the one who went and came back and went and came back, the one who was so petrified that first night he arrived. His novel, finished!

I enter the competition, my magnum opus…

But then fear. It rises through me, unstoppable. Terror, horror.

And then during the next session the fear only mounts. Insecurities rising – this isn’t like the old puzzles and riddles. In this competition I’ve just hastily entered there are no right and wrong, no instruction or control – no control and suddenly I’m desperate for it. I need control, claw at my paper for it but all I feel are blank pages of temporary potential, art ready to be unleashed upon them. But I’m no artist. Give me back control, please. Please.

I’m choking and I have to get air as I sprint from the writing group, sweating as the sun bears it’s weight on my soul forcing me down into the Earth. I can’t- I can’t, I need to get back to my puzzles. I’m safe there, no risk. I bolt, leaving the Church and it’s artists behind. The competition, I can’t bear to think about it. I need control. Forget the writing. Forget.

THREE WEEKS LATER

The winners of the competition are announced. I read them in the local paper. Shaking, I skim through the names of winners. I spot Sam, the picture of her red-faced, red-haired still. The poetry category: she is runner-up, beaming in her photograph as she’s handed the award. Pride, that’s why she’s smiling, the award a reassurance that she is indeed an artist appropriate to hold the title of poet and continue the legacy of Shelley, Tennyson, Hardy.

But her comment, just below her smiling picture, crushes everything I once thought. I frantically read, newspaper trembling in my hands as my eyes, watering, dart left to right – not the same watering eyes from my freezing puzzle groups all those Winters ago, these watering eyes are born not from the chill of snow and ice, but from warmth, peace. Sam lays clear her ideals, her soul – “[…] anyone can be a poet or a writer, and though I am so pleased I’ve come second in this competition my heart goes out to all those who didn’t. If you’re one of them – I don’t wish to patronise you, I promise – but if you’re one of them reading this and thinking ‘wow, I could never write poetry’, I just beg you to try. Because we all can, and we all should.”

I gulp. Terror rising as I realise these words are for me, as if I were there in the room with her when the picture was taken, and the interview given. And how many more like me are there, too afraid to express, afraid of failure, retreating into hobbies like puzzling, back into the safe arms of absolute answers. Snow-coated snoods, beady eyes in desperate need of control.

I collapse into my chair, drowsy from the headrush. I’ve forgotten I even entered the competition – Sam’s words are so shattering that I feel unworthy to have submitted my novel under pretences of victory being the goal. No. No! There is only the victory as you write each word and sentence and paragraph and page and chapter. The victory of self, of the act of making art however flawed and un-correct and imperfect, that is the victory and nirvana.

And so, where else can I go. And so, I go back to the Church. And so, I make my final return to Linda’s writing group. I call it my final return, as I know now that in twenty years’ time I shall still be here, every Wednesday and spilling my soul onto paper.

Tail between legs, I shuffle into the Church, novel tucked under my arm ready to be picked apart and me, ready to start again, honest this time. My need for control is fading and as I hand Linda my book, I ask her to read a chapter to the group so I can be laid bare, born again new and humbled.

She obliges, and I dart up and down, frenzied as the words I once wrote for that competition are now shown in their true form, my control disappearing and gone. Finally, I can breathe as the sun sets on the warm evening, Church doors open to the cool air that blows in a new way of being for me. Linda hands back my novel. I thank her as the session starts, and I am reborn.