The Heart of Time

She cradled the orb in her arms, nurturing it as her own, it wasn't hers of course, just some shiny she'd picked up along the way while he'd been sleeping, he was always sleeping. Its' colors were a deep piercing blue with swirling white and a spattering of browns and greens. This would be her new toy, something to play with while he slept.

She'd been waiting for him to stop sleeping for what could be have been eternity, she was sure he'd come out of it some time, after all he'd gone into the sleeping state, logic stood to reason he'd come out of it, and then, then he would be hers and they would make something new, maybe he'd even help her with her new play thing.

The first thing she did was make another orb, a bright ball of fire, one to keep her smaller orb warm, then she sent her small toy sailing around it looping lazily at just the right speed, yes this is a good start she thought to herself, but there was a problem, only one side of the orb was being kept warm by the glowing ball, she'd need to make the orb spin, then it would all get some warmth and some light. The spinning worked perfectly, and the orb began to slosh, giant pools began to melt and the green and brown bits became more solid looking less frozen in their places, they began to move and shudder.

She cocked her head to the side peering deep into the orb, it was growing things. The ones that took their life from the fire orb she called plants, the ones that ate the plants she called animals, and the more they spun around the fire orb the more and more of them their seemed to be. This was great fun, watching them grow and change, looking closer then further back. She liked her new toy, it had kept her busy for quite awhile already and there was still much more she could do with it. She began to whip up breath to cover the landscape, change the shape of the surface, scatter all the small pieces and throw them around, then tears swollen from the water and dropped back to the surface.

And all the while he slept, in his chair, his long grey beard trailing lazily through the cosmos, he wasn't as new as she was, needed the rest, he'd always been that way, but the sleeps grew longer it seemed and she wondered how he got anything done.

In the before; before the sleeping he'd helped her to make orbs and grow things, patiently cultivating and changing the landscape, one orb they'd made had grown sentient developed so many ways of destroying it's self, he'd been so concerned with the orb, they'd nicknamed it Terra, their sentient daughter, and though she'd tried to nurture it, and he'd tried to wait it out Terra had gotten much stronger than they'd hoped.

She'd tried breaths, and floods, and fires to calm her, the critters on Terra had named them "acts of god" and yet they referred to her as "Mother Nature" perhaps it was them combined that was God? She wasn't sure, the Terrans were strange critters, naming and destroying and capturing as much as they could that got in their path.

Before the sleeping, he'd put Terra in a box, sealed her up in his beard, frozen and still. It had drained him so completely, the rhythmic pulsing in his chest had slowed, his heart giving it's last to protect Terra. She'd wept as he slept at first, waited, as patiently as she could for him to wake, but patience was never her strong gift, no she was the doer, the grower, the changer, the Mother of Nature, to his Father of Time, and waiting didn't come easily to her. Slowly she'd begun to collect orbs again, though he wasn't helping her to make them now, now they appeared as if from some other force than time, they bounded into their cosmos, and she grew them and nurtured them and waited while he slept.

This is 1/2 of my entries for week 8 lj idol exhibit B; choose your own adventure topics of 4, this pieces was written on the topic "The Heart Of Time". concrit always welcome.

When I Was Young

I had my first daughter four months before my twentieth birthday, and two years later I had my second. Within a handful of months of the birth of my then baby I was staring at a stack of bills, I was unemployed, homeless, legally separated, I had no education and not much left in terms of friends or family having spent years in isolation, I struck out, I built us a life and I never looked back with even an ounce of regret.

I remember telling friends I didn't mind not having a life of my own, I didn't know what I was missing, I'd never been to a bar never really been drunk or partied or had a one night stand. I'd gone from living with my parents, to married with two kids in an isolated small town where I was rarely allowed outside never mind seeing friends or family, so the transition to single mom, working mom, full time mom, wasn't difficult. In fact it was liberating. I was free. I had my girls, and my life and no one could tell me what to do. And yet, largely I did nothing. I was always home, in bed, by 10pm, having tucked my girls into bed sometime after 7pm, 7 was my magic curfew, I was sure we'd all turn back into pumpkins, that my ex would KNOW we were out if we weren't home by 7pm, this curfew he'd set out for me was ingrained deep in my mind. I'd overdose on LiveJournal, read web comics, chat online, all of my friends lived in my computer anyway and I didn't stray from that much at all, at least not at first.

Life was quiet and yet so unbelievably busy, both of my kids were early risers, and terrible sleepers, I went about five years before I slept through the night after the birth of my eldest, there were days the lack of sleep left me so hopelessly depressed I didn't think it would ever get better. I did though, and while they've never been great sleepers, it's rare now that I'm left hopeless and exhausted more than every-so-often.

The thing that's always bothered me most when I tell these types of stories or I explain how at 28 I'm about to have a 9 year old, is the ever present comment from someone who did things differently than I did, "I don't know how you did it!", at one point I went off on an epic rant;

Was there another option? Did I miss the "reset" button, where I can go back in time and do it all differently? Was there an exit back on the Highway of Life that read "Ex-Husband is No Longer A Douche-Bucket, and All Of Your Problems Are Now Solved, turn here"?

Last I checked, I did it, one day at a time, one moment, at a time some days, clinging to those girls to keep ourselves afloat, not end up another statistic of "single welfare-mom with no education beats her kids, has 5 more, gets them taken away, has a substance abuse problem, goes no where, finds one abusive man after another".

No one ever stepped in and said to me "you know, you can just leave" I suspect because they all knew I wouldn't, I couldn't, that those weren't my values, that those babies meant (and still mean) everything to me, because when I was younger it just wasn't an option that would ever have occurred to me.

When I eventually got old enough to realize that being a decent human being was a Choice ( with a capital "C"; among many) it was the most terrifying moment of my life, to realize that as an adult, for the most part the only person I was truly accountable to was myself, that no one other than me was holding me hostage to my decisions good or bad, and that much like my ex-husband chose to do, the option had been there for me as well to just walk away.

This is 2/2 of my entries for week 8 lj idol exhibit B; choose your own adventure topics of 4, this pieces was written on the topic "When I Was Young".