Storyworld: The Well of Memory

You know how sometimes when you buy a gift for someone, you buy it because you actually want it for yourself?  Well, that’s exactly what I did this Christmas when I bought Storyworldfor my children.  It’s a book of ideas for how to create new stories and a set of the most gorgeous cards, each beautifully illustrated and entitled with an element of a story: The Enchantress, The Wishing Tree, The Youngest Son, The Key.

I’ve decided that I want to write a little bit about each for Less Ordinary.  There is no goal in mind – no final project.  I just want to enjoy the magic of the words as they flow from my imagination and through my fingertips.  If you want to join in, you are more than welcome, whether as a tweet, a comment, a blog post or any form of artistic response. The world, as they say, is your oyster.

The first card that I picked at random this morning was The Well of Memory….

Standing at the edge of the well, I looked down and saw… nothing.  A great expanse of dark nothing; an oblivion stretching as far and as deep as my gaze could penetrate.  I began to feel disorientated, the way one feels when the eyes strain, expecting to see at least a small something… longing to find that point at which to focus on.  But, no.  The effort was overwhelming and I stopped straining to see.  I let my vision relax.

Just then, it appeared… glistening and twinkling and dancing just out of reach.  I stretched out my arm and extended my finger to try and catch it, catch it and bring it home, but it was further from me that I had originally thought.  The bucket sat beside my feet, rotting and rusty, overgrown with moss and shrouded with spiderweb.  I picked it up and tied the rope around its handle, and dropped it over the edge, with not too much faith that when descending down the well, the knot would not loosen, and the bucket tumble down into the depths, disappearing into darkness.

I lowered the bucket down, down, down towards my prize, hearing it clang off the slippery wet stones all the way.  Eventually it hit the water at the bottom, and the dancing, twinkling, glistening light… disappeared.  And then reappeared.  It played this game of moving in and out of being for some time, until the dissipated slivers  gathered themselves together once more, and I could see it… beautiful, desirable and tantalisingly, utterly, heart-breakingly out of reach.

I began to raise the bucket, slowly slowly, so as not to disturb my special nocturnal catch.  A couple of times, I thought that I had lost it again.  That it had slipped through, slipped away.  And my breath caught in anxious anticipation, readying myself for its loss.  But ever so slowly, I pulled it towards me, closer closer, until my eyes began to adjust to the gloom and to focus through the distant dark.  And it was only then that I recognised what it was that I had caught.  It was your name.

Your beautiful name.  Your name that I forgot, despite all our years of marriage, the raising of our children, the worrying over money, the laughter, the lovemaking, the loss.  Your name that is so precious to me.  I breathe a sigh of relief and write it down in my now shakey handwriting beside the crossword puzzle.  The nurse crouches down beside my chair and asks if I’m ok, and I tell her yes.  Yes, I am. Yes, because I remembered the name of my beloved.  I caught it in the well of memory.