(Took a rest from everything on Saturday so combining day 9 and 10 in today’s writing session, 10 July 2022).
When Simone opened her eyes, the world had scattered into a million pieces. It was as if someone had taken what they should have seen but painted with a flat paintbrush, grouping together the major colours and elements but washing away all the full details.
“What in the world…” she wanted to say, but then it came back to her. This wasn’t some strange glitch of their memory travels - it was what her world had looked like. For several years, before she—
She shook her head, the memories coming hard and fast, bombarding her. How had she not remembered this? In her mind’s eye, when she had promised Sir Time to show him, her memories had been normal. Painful, traumatising, excruciating yes… But certainly not this strange.
The colours — the individual brush strokes as she saw them — pulsed and shimmered in front of her, fading as if they might disappear becoming back into focus. Every now and then a specific area would flare to life, calling for her attention even as it went accompanied with a blinding flash of pain that kept her from properly seeing what it wanted to show her. Then everything would fade to a dull consistency, every now and then the individual colours washing out completely, turning instead into a dull array of browns of ochres as empty as the very desert itself.
A touch on her arm jerked her back to the present moment, and she realised she had no idea how long she had been standing there, musing on her own memories. She glanced over to see Sir Time at her side, his eyes wide.
“You have your own memory bank,” he whispered, his eyes moving from side to side as he seemed to take everything in.
“You can see this?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. It was as if her memories had become a living being, and she found herself afraid of it.
“See it? You have no idea.” Sir Time took a step forward, reaching out his hand.
A block of colour - shimmering with greens - zoomed towards Simone, growing bigger as it came closer. She gasped as she saw movement inside, the colours translating into shifting shapes. People, she realised. The garden, the royals, one of the many days that she had spent as their Gardener, their gift, as they had called her. Their gift, perhaps, but her nightmare. She shook her head, and the memory spun away. But it had opened her up to the truth of what she was seeing, and suddenly she saw movement inside each block, each one containing it’s own memory, and in itself creating a new tapestry of colour and shape to behold.
“I don’t understand… I can see these are my memories, that they are what was, and that I can see them like this now would make sense, in some strange twisted way. But… This is what my life looked like back then. I’d blocked it out somehow, but seeing this all again —“
“You had become their Keeper,” Sir Time breathed, turning his awed gaze towards her. A stunned silence hung between them, and he leaned forward to grip her arms. “Keepers are designated for life. The very goal of their existence becomes the well-being of whatever entity or area they have been assigned. For a human to take on that role… They never told you or explained to you what you were really doing there?” Anger tightened the corners of his eyes, his mouth flattening into a grim line, and Simone couldn’t help but take a step back.
She shook her head, guilt pushing up like bile in her throat. The colours - the memory blocks - shifted and twisted in front of her, their shapes becoming tapered and distorted as her body flared with emotion. “I did the best I could, honestly I did, but when the opportunity came to escape…”
She crumpled to her knees, her hands gripping her temples. A memory engulfed her, her very last day in the Garden, the day she had left it all behind… She tried to pull away, to not relive that day, the terrible choice she’d had to make, but she couldn’t— Pain flared again along her arms and legs, right into her chest where she had been connected to the Garden through the twisted bronze vines. Even in the midst of her agony, she pushed the memories away, as if she could keep her mind’s eye squinted and keep everything blurred.
“Please, I can’t… Please, make this stop,” she bent over, leaning her head against her knees, repeating the wordless plea to Sir Time in her head. Even though her eyes were squeezed shut, she sensed him next to her, stepping behind her. She could feel a sudden intake of breath, and incredible power flowed around her. In her mind’s eye, she saw him as he had been meant to be — nothing missing, nothing broken. The clock on his hat shone with golden light, the cuckoo safely tucked away as the hands ticked at a steady rhythm. As she watched, one of the shorter arms reached the top of the clock and with a sudden resounding gong the cuckoo flew from the hat, it’s wings fluttering so fast they were all but a blur. In front of her, her memories seemed to shrink, the colour blocks righting themselves first into the correct shapes before growing smaller and smaller and smaller. Then they started to move, one after the other, like little carriages on one big train, heading towards Sir Time as if being sucked in by the cuckoo itself. They flew over her head, leaving a stream of colour behind as the cuckoo opened its beak abnormally wide, swallowing each memory whole. Its belly swelled and swirled with a rainbow of colours, but it simply grew and grew as it absorbed more memories, the task seeming somehow effortless, right. Simone gasped as she saw more colours lift from her skin, the bronze vines that had reformed there slowly dissolving in the process. Her body bent backwards, a scream jerked from her lungs as the very core of who she’d had to become was ripped from her chest, like a parasite that was finally being removed.
The cuckoo belched, then, a strange thunderous sound, before starting its normal, clear call — once, twice, on it went until twelve dongs had sounded. Simone collapsed forwards, silence ringing around them, her memories quiet and blank.
Sir Time stepped forward and knelt down, his broken parts restored. His feet were still enormous, but clad now in stylish boots with gold-tipped rims. The clock ticked happily away, the sound oddly reassuring as he leaned forward and drew her into an embrace. Sobs racked her body as he held her, his one hand pressing against the back of her head, rubbing her hair as a parent would a child.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” he muttered over and over. “It was never your burden to bear.”
Finally, she felt ready to pull back and push herself to her feet. She found one block had remained, a bright white rectangle shining in front of her. It was different from the others, reminding her more of a door than a block of colour.
Sir Time nodded towards it. “We have to put an end to this, Simone. Otherwise you will never be free — and neither will Oasis.”
Simone swallowed, her throat dry. “What if—“
Sir Time gripped her hand and met her eyes. “This time will be different. I promise you. This time, you won’t be alone.”
She nodded, taking one last deep breath before stepping forward, back into one last, final memory with Sir Time at her side.
Yikes okay… In all honesty, I’d been putting off this writing session because after the last few days of intense writing, I was… Tired? Unsure what would happen next? Intimidated? I’m not sure exactly what, but something was blocking me a little bit. Now, I’m quite blown away but what happened in this scene. When I sat in our garden to paint this afternoon, I knew I wanted to play with my new Neptune flat brush and thus use “flat” strokes to capture the late afternoon colours that I saw, but I had no idea at the time how that little experiment would inspire this scene. At the time, I had to keep reminding myself to stop wanting to make the painting “perfect”, to worry about whether the strokes and colours would make sense or not and whether it would look like anything in the end. “It doesn’t matter”, I reminded myself. What mattered instead was each moment - the touch of brush to paper, seeing the textures where a dry brush occurred, seeing the colours mingle, feeling my heart jump for joy as I put bold dabs of Opera Pink in select places. Enjoying the colour play of nature as I put those colours to paper… And now, having written, these blocks get even more meaning! And I remind myself, once again - “just keep writing” and trust your subconscious! Yes, there are many loose ends coming up here, or rather, many questions being raised. Will we ever find out exactly what it entailed for Simone in her time as Gardener? Maybe, probably… But for now, I’m relishing this moment of discovery and seeing these two creative avenues inspire and inform each other.
Music: “Return to Sender”, “Big Life”
Colours used: Daniel Smith Buff Titanium, Green Appetite Genuine, Burnt Umber, Indigo, Quinacridone Gold, Quinacridone Burnt Sienna, Opera Pink