For reasons I don’t entirely understand, posts involving things form my scrap folder seem oddly popular. Admittedly I suspect having now said that, no one will read this post, as my audience is as predictable as a British summer. Bless your cotton socks… In any regard this is a bit of an odd one, I remember writing this, I remember why I wrote it, because I have read the messages I sent myself in the night… The first of which was this one.

I sent that as a direct message to myself at 4:22 in the morning. So I must have been awake at the time, either due to insomnia with my mind flitting about, or because I woke up from a dream and needed to write that line down in a hurry. What ever it was… In any regard just under 40 minutes later I sent this…

Which suggests i was still awake, or I was texting myself in my sleep. Or of course someone had broken into my house, and was leaving messaged to me on my phone to mess with my head… No of course I’m not paranoid, why would you say that?

A minute latter the third and final message was left…

I then returned to the arms of sleeps sweet embrace, or stared at the ceiling in horror at the faces forming in the shadows… Its a coin toss really.

In the morning , or at some point not long after that, I read those messages back and possibly it triggered the memory of the story I had been telling myself in the night. Or I wrote the beginnings to a story based upon the messages I had sent myself and it had nothing to do with what had been on my mind, it was merely what I imagined was on my mind when I wrote those messages in the darkness.

Or whoever/whatever wrote them…

Which brings me to this very short far from finished tale, I’ve not yet gotten around to completing, written over two years ago now. A story I think is set in ancient Greece (I’m not entirely sure), and sort of know what its about and who the two observers of the strange drama unfolding between a young girl and the last leaf on an olive tree…

“Don’t you dare leaf… You stay right there… Don’t think of falling… Not today leaf… You stay where you are.” The young girl insisted with a tone that boke no argument.  

Not that the leaf was in a position to argue.  

She was, he determined, not much past her first decade of life, yet from her demeanour he determined she was no longer a child. Which is to say she had faced heartache and the grim realities of life with the understanding that comes from having no one to shelter you.  

“Don’t you dare leaf… You stay right there… Don’t think of falling… Not today leaf… You stay where you are.” She repeated as he observed her and not for the first time. It seemed a mantra of her own making, a mantra that spoke of determination and a willfulness that would not be denied.  

“Don’t you dare leaf… You stay right there… Don’t think of falling… Not today leaf… You stay where you are.” She said again and as she did so he realised behind the willful determination there was a desperation. An imploring lilt to her voice hidden deep within.  

In a sense, he realised, it was not so much that she willfully wished the leaf not to fall, as the certainty that should it fall, she believed her world would fall with it.   

“What is this?” he asked his companion on the barren rocky hillside that overlooked the walled garden attached to girls tiny house. More hovel than house, he thought, a squat squarish building of rough stone with a roof of peat sod and hay. It had one room, with two small cots huddled around an open fire. 

I sort of love this little story, the is a beautiful melancholy feel to it. I think that very first message in the night time was the words of the observers companion. I think the girl was told by her father that he would return form the war before the last leaf fell, hence she will not ‘let’ it fall. I think the he who asked ‘What is this?’ is the spirit of her father, unaware he is dead and that she is his daughter. I mean to finish it at some point, but we will have to see if I get to it

As regards his companion, in case your wondering, well she is one who collects the souls of the departed, and has sisters, one of which is Fate, but her most terrible sister, as that first text in the night time stated, is Hope…