My Twitter- @gabysayshey
Bel air
‘Back in my Bel Air days, before I got married and left the
States, I underwent a lot of pressure, stress and anxiety in my everyday life,
due to general unorginasation and craziness. I would strut to meetings in high
heels during the weekdays and spend the weekends in dark and hazy bohemian
bars, with new beautiful friends every week, in flourishes of peroxide and
cologne. By the time the end of the month approached, the city fumes and the
hot sweat, compiled with my never-ending headaches, eventually got the better
of me, and one weekend, I threw myself into a random train, an overnight bag
beside me, and let it bring me anywhere, and I luckily discovered the loneliest
part of Bel Air.
I came across it by accident, and returned to it once every
few months, to clear my head, inhale the fresh cold air, right up until we
moved.
The train would drop me off and I would hire a bright red
97’ Chevrolet at the station- similar to my very own one- and drive until I
found it. This consisted of 2-3 hours of darting around the town, zig-zagging,
turning and driving monotonously to and fro, until the place would appear,
until the little gravel road would find me.
In all simplesness, it was really just an abandoned large
cottage in the middle of a field of crisp grass, surrounded by a few bare young
deciduous trees, standing lonely around the cottage, like they were keeping the
house’s company, reassuring its loneliness.
By the time I would find that secluded area, peripheral from
the rest of Bel Air, sheltered and hidden, the sunset would be hitting that
point where it just gets unmistakably gorgeous: a bright, deep, crimson sun
with orange cirrus clouds accompanying it, as if protecting it from harmful
eyes. Flakes of orange were woven in-between the clouds, shades of yellow were
flaked into the white light, like something out of a Technicolor 1970’s movie.
Stars had just begun to show, desperate to get a peek of the extraordinary
sight, peeping in, always from the left side of the sky, bringing darkness and
a full cold moon with them.
Even though night time would be fast approaching, as the
heat cooled and temperature fell, the birds awakened, became alive, and a
mockingjay’s song was always very clear and shrill, but I could never spot any
mockingjays themselves. Starlings and sparrows treated the colourful sky like a
playground: they darted in and out of
the clouds, formed clusters and geometrical shapes, flapping their dark wings
excitedly, chattering amongst themselves as darkness fell.
The sky was busy, but so was the ground, the field that held
the lonely cottage. Long, uncut blades of grass brushed and tingled my sins as
I strode through them, and the bed of greenery was a home to wild field
flowers; sunshine coloured daffodils, the biggest petals I had ever seen. The
green sea also held daisies, not tiny little flowers, no, large proper heads of
daisies on which you could predict your love life on- ‘he loves me, he loves me
not…’. The flowers had the most wonderful scents- sweet, delicate aromas that
washed over you, combined with the fresh smell of grass and freedom, relaxed my
tensions. I used to wish it could’ve been possible for me to somehow store all
of the scents in a flask, and bring it back to the city, to use as a tool for
releasing any anxieties whenever I wished, but unfortunately it wasn't to be.
Bare trees complemented the cottage, with their stiff,
thick, rugged bark and thin branches that made a ‘snap!’ when broken. Thick low
clouds seemed imprisoned in those branches, thick pink candyfloss clouds, dense
with precipitation.
Dirty, beige paint chipped off the walls of the house, and
cherry trees stood tall, mighty and proud, in all of their glory, at the back
of the house, in what would've been the garden. They always had cherries that
weighed down the branches- ripe sparkling fruit on green stems, but I
discovered that around 1 in a dozen cherries, there was only one sweet and
sickly- the other eleven lying sisters were sour like lemons. Regardless, I
always kept coming back for more, picking and tasting until I hit the jackpot.
That field, those daisies and starlings and dusty windows
were my home in a foreign land, my own private piece of paradise, here for me
whenever I wished. The place had a taste of mystery around it- whose house was
it, who had lived here, why had they left? I never researched, and I never
really cared, all I knew was that Heaven was available, exclusively to me,
whenever I wished to visit.’
Thanks for reading!
Gaby x
No comments:
Post a Comment