Writing

Writing backwards

I was alone at the table, behind the wind screen in some payment café, no dogs allowed. The coffee was that warm, continental, granular dish water kind. Foggy on the top and hard to tell if there was any actual milk or cream in there. I supped it slowly and let the pieces of coffee dust swim around my mouth - it was a decent beverage and the cup was a warm and tactile one, thin edge and smooth china. I’d blocked out the traffic and passing pedestrians, the paper readers and the tourists, my focus would be the lined note book now placed between the coffee cup and the half eaten muffin on the too small plate. I had a nice pen, that’s always important. I picked it up in my left hand and removed the cap, allowing the nib to touch the paper.

I stared straight ahead, through the back of a diner’s head, past a lamp post and traffic sign, beyond the edge of a building, into a carved stone balustrade, over a suspended lamp and away into the distance where grey and brown stone building merged into a mess of hoardings and bus tops. My left hand, as if it had a left hand and mind of it’s own began to write. A scribbly, scrawny scrawl, an out of body mess of ink and paper while I gazed far and away and my unloved lesser hand did the work. Time had stopped, my thought processes had stopped but the hand continued to write.

I was asleep and in a dream, the coffee had dried the back of my throat but my transcendental peering into the abyss carried on and the hand wrote on, page after page, only stopping to allow the lazy right to turn the page to a fresh one when that was required. The was sweat on my brow and in both palms but the writing was over, the pen was rested and my hand returned the conscious control of my brain though I’m not sure which side.

I picked up the noted book and flicked across the pages…complete gibberish, well that was my first thought and then a pattern began to emerge…