We are our memories.
The moments we create.
The experiences we live.
The feelings we share.
The thoughts we make.
So quicken your heartbeat, to live a little wilder, to laugh a little harder and to love a little deeper.
Let your pulse race to live a little stronger and fill your life with those instants that take your breath away.
Allow yourself to live as fully as possible and become better, stronger and happier with each passing day.
Also part of Daily Prompt: Quicken
Jupiter was born and raised on Saturn but fell in love on Mars. She knew well what it meant to be split between two worlds. Literally.
When she was born, her parents, native Saturnians, decided to give her the name of another planet, simply because it seemed so majestic from their view of the solar system. She grew up on Saturn, a planet where everything had the shade of blue. From sky blue, to aquamarine, to turquoise, to dark blue, to blue black even. She liked her planet a lot. But Jupiter was restless. She wanted to go out there and explore. She was certain there was something more out there. Something other than just this blue.
She soon found herself on Mars, a planet filled with shades of red – ruby red, dark red, pink red, rose, coral red. She decided to stay a while and discover a different way of life. Variety always intrigues. Together with that, however, she found a breath of fresh air and a soulmate that made her heart beat a little bit faster.
But he was on Mars. And her family was on Saturn.
The distance was minimised by rapid-speed vehicles that helped make the light-year journey seem like crossing over to another neighbourhood. But it still entailed travelling between planets. And no matter how often or how long she stayed on one, it never seemed enough. So Jupiter decided to do something. She took out her heart and split it in half. She gave one part to her family to remember that even if she wasn’t constantly physically present she was always with them. The other she replaced in her chest and flew to Mars. Her soulmate would complete the other half, and she would always be whole when she returned home.
Carol had purchased five tubes of glitter. It was silvery-blue, like the one she had so often imagined adorned the bodies of fairies. She was going all out this year. It might seem as an extravaganza of a costume, but she wanted to feel good and in doing so, she wanted to breathe life into a fantasy. That entailed living it out in full.
But karma has it that some things don’t always turn out the way we imagine them too.
The first clue was when the heel of her shoe broke, while she pranced around the house in her fairy dress to make sure she could walk a sufficient amount of time as a few inches taller than her natural height.
The second was when the hem of the dress got caught at the corner of the living room table, while she was spinning, tearing a very noticeable hole at the bottom of the transparent tulle.
The third was when she noticed that most of the glitter tubes had for some reason cracked open, filling the inside of her shopping bag with a splutter of gluey tinsel.
Carol gave up. She sat on her bed crying at her misfortune. All that time and energy she had spent; all those images she had concocted in her head of her entrance to the masquerade party; it all vanished in a few seconds.
She now no longer had a costume to wear and had lost all desire to join the carnival this year.
A cup of tea and an hour later, nerves calmed and rationale restored, Carol decided to search the attic for a costume. Surely there was something forgotten up there.
She wanted to dress as a fairy, but found something even better – a Venetian princess costume. And with just the right amount of glitter on her chest and shoulders, she embodied the essence of the renaissance itself.
Some things indeed don’t always turn out the way we imagine them too. But sometimes this happens for something even better to occur.
Also part of Daily Prompt: Glitter
His grandmother had told him when he was young that “when you don’t know what to say, it is better to say nothing at all”. The same is true when you having nothing to say. You shouldn’t speak for the sake of saying something. That’s just noise.
So he grew up being laconic with his speech. He wanted every word he uttered to count. The people around him often thought he was too introvert; didn’t open up too much. Others saw his silence as apathy or ignorance.
But often it is in the silence that most is said.
He knew the value of placing quality over quantity. And much of that was valid for speech too. He disliked people who would talk for hours about nothing simply to maintain attention drawn onto them. Instead he relished the moments when he would retreat from the world and gaze at it passing by without having to say a word.
It is in those moments that you find yourself. That you realise what you need, what you want, and sometimes what makes you tired or happy.
It is those moments that make you grateful for all you have and for simply being alive.
And it is right after that moment when you don’t know what to say, that your mind is flushed with all the things you wish you had said…
Also part of Daily Prompt: Sound
You might in essence be talking to a screen, but it’s beyond that: you’re engaging with the people who for some reason or other can’t be physically with you at that moment. The range and evolution of new technology nowadays allows you to contact at any place and any time people who may be situated miles away.
It enables you to share your news, to ask for help, to learn how to do things together – such as cook a meal, bake a cake, or even sew, no matter the distance that physically separates you.
There are some things you just know. And there are some people who can see those things without you really having to say anything. Parents are people like that. People who know when you need help even when you’re not asking for it. People who understand you are not well, no matter how much you try and hide it. People who will reassure you and make you feel better, even when you insist that everything is fine.
And it is at moments like those when you acknowledge the importance and dependence we have on technology and social media. Because if used right, it diminishes the miles and brings you home.
What does anyone really want on Valentine’s day? What does anyone want on any day, really? Because 14 February, in essence, is just another day. But it happens to be one on which couples suddenly remember they’re in love, and singles feel the need to demonstrate why they’re better alone.
Susy and her husband had agreed that they were in love all year round, and they would show it to each other as often and as much as they could. For them, this was just another day on which they had an extra reason to go out and enjoy themselves.
Jonah was racking his brain for days trying to find the perfect gift for his wife. He wanted something special. Something different. Something memorable. Apart from the standard flowers and chocolates in a heart-shaped box, that is. So he decided to take her for dinner to a restaurant they had never been before, but one which was acclaimed and seemed to match her liking. She was the person who would get excited with the little things, so she was bound to be thrilled.
Susy, on the other hand, had difficulty in planning the perfect gift. Because what amounts to perfection? She thought of a framed photo of them, but couldn’t chose just one. And she didn’t want to fall into the commercial trap that took over this specific day.
So she did something different.
She took the day of work on the eve of V-day and stayed home to surprise him. She prepared his favourite dessert and planned a relaxing walk along the beach at sunset. The sparkle in his eyes and the smile that stretched across his face when he found her home, unexpectedly waiting for him, was all she needed as an acknowledgement that sometimes the perfect gifts aren’t things; they are moments, people and actions that show us we are loved and cared for.
She was tired. In fact, she was exhausted. But he refused to acknowledge it. He failed to see how she strived to make her daily routine seem so effortless, while she was camouflaging the pain in the smile she always wore.
He worked hard. And she worked even harder. She tried to support him as much as she could, without asking for anything in return, other than a simply gesture of appreciation, a humble ‘thank you’, a hug and a kiss.
She was sick. But he failed to see it.
Not even when her light was dimming, could he see that he was losing her. She didn’t speak out, of fear that she would upset him too much and that he would overreact, as he usually did when trying to gain control of a situation.
Instead, she allowed herself to wither in the silence of her progressive departure. He was too fixated on his own beliefs to see that something was wrong. And it was only when she left that he realised what had happened. That fateful morning when she was no longer there. When the sky darkened and clouds brought on a tremendous storm.
But it was too late. He had allowed her to drown in her own secret, alone, because she loved him too much to make him worry.
She left with a photo of their last trip together hovering over their bed as an eternal memory.
It was the first time Max had found himself in a psychologist’s office. He was postponing it for too long; he needed someone to listen to all the things that had accumulated inside him and were causing him stomach aches. The main problem he had to face was that he cared too much – he over-thought and over-worried about anything. Maybe this doctor would be able to show him how to care less, or at least how to not allow things to affect him as much.
Outside in the waiting room was a sign on the wall, a blue canvas with the inscription “Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud.” It resonated with Max, as he thought about all the people in his life who annoyed him the most and who he wrongly permitted to distress him – they were all people who claimed center stage, those who thought that everything should be about them, who adopted an attitude close to that of a bully, and who pretended to mask their low self-esteem in (often overly) socialization.
For an hour, Max poured out his feelings to the person he had just met sitting across him in the small, yet cozy, room. He found himself telling him stories and emotions that he had never even admitted to himself. Psychologists, he realised, have a way of making you feel comfortable enough to share your inner most thoughts without dwelling too much on what you’re saying.
When the psychologist’s turn to talk came, Max took out a small notebook to write certain things down. They may have been just phrases, but they would help him in changing his own attitude and facing the situations he was forced to deal with on a daily basis.
“Insecurity is an ugly thing. It makes you hate people you don’t even know. More so, insults are the last resort of insecure people with a crumbling position trying to appear confident. Insecure people seek approval. They try to talk everyone down so that can feel superior. Don’t allow yourself to fall into that trap. Try, as much as you can to ignore them. Just don’t interfere in their lives so that they won’t interfere in yours. Remember, you only give them more power the more attention you devote to them. So simply turn the other way. Demonstrate your own confidence by shying away from the spotlight; let it chase you, not the other way round. Do something different instead: build people up, remind them they’re worthy, tell them they’re incredible; be a light in an often too dim world”.
Max left the office feeling uplifted. Sometimes, all it takes is some words of encouragement to view the situation in a different aspect.
Here’s how it goes; if you want a pep talk, then you’ll have to learn to swallow the truth: No-one cares what’s going on in your life. They don’t care if you’re sick, if you’re tired, if you have personal problems, work difficulties, or whatever. They don’t even care if they call and are interrupting you from something, or if they send you a message and are disturbing you. They don’t care if the time you devote to them means that you’re missing out on your own time, which you could have spent doing something else. No-one cares about all that. All they care about is getting what they want from you.
Everybody has their own business to attend to. Everyone has their own path to follow, but that doesn’t mean it is the same for everyone. That is what we need to acknowledge and understand. Because it is said that successful people never worry about what others are doing. What you should worry about, is doing whatever it is your doing right. Like Paolo Coelho says, “We can never judge the life of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path”.
Humans have an inherent and unalterable weakness: they are, by nature, selfish. What they care about is themselves: how to further their own interests, how to achieve their own goals, regardless of whom or what they trample on. And to add to that, they are greedy. They always want more and nothing is ever enough.
If you can master these two characteristics: if you can teach yourself to care about the lives of others too, to be more sympathetic to their own needs, and to realise that you don’t know their story or what they’re going through; if you can convince yourself that things could always be worse – you could have nothing – then you will become a better person. And if you can pass this on so that more people can become better, then that is how society will improve.
Be positive and smile, even when things don’t seem to go your way. Even that slight gesture may change someone’s world.
Also part of Daily Prompt: Recognize
©Roger Bultot
“It all begins and ends in your mind,” she once told him. “What you give power to, has power over you”.
Right now, he was fighting not to call her. To tell her how much he missed her and wanted her back.
There was still snow on the porch outside. She would have been thrilled by it.
And her orchid by the window was waiting for her too.
He stared at the dials on the phone; Ralph Waldo Emerson had said, “we gain the strength of the temptation we resist”. But he did not feel any stronger. Quite the contrary.
Also part of Friday Fictioneers
Also part of Daily Prompt: Resist
MC's Whispers 