Zoe heaved a sigh like a punctured balloon and collapsed onto her bed. The navy cocktail dress she had worn for her date with Jack lay crumpled and discarded on the floor, cast off in favour of her comfiest pyjamas. It had taken all her self-control not to raid the fridge the moment she got in. The idea of eating strawberry jam with a spoon was an undeniably appealing one given what had just transpired, but she knew from experience that the subsequent sugar crash would only make her feel worse. So instead she made herself a hot chocolate and…
I want to stand at a bar again and ask you what you fancy,
To weave my slow way back to you trying not to spill a drop,
Inevitably fail when I put the glass down in front of you,
And settle in for a conversation as long as a medium-haul flight.
I want to go over our old ground for what must be the hundredth time, To overlay my memories with yours and see what patterns they make, For you to make me laugh until the back of my neck hurts, As we reminisce about all the times we’ve…
Once upon a time, there was a lone space traveller. He spent his life travelling from galaxy to galaxy, and was always in search of something. Sometimes it was a particular planet. Other times it was a glimpse of a certain star. He was constantly on the move, but not always in the way he had planned.
You see, the lone traveller had a strange habit. When he set off in search of a place, he often ended up taking an entirely different route to the one he intended. He didn’t mean to. Things just happened to him. Once, while…
A friend of mine once told me he “could never marry a woman who thought the wedding dress was important.” It was an interesting statement to make, given that the friend in question had asked me out on more than one occasion and knew that I had a longstanding love of dresses. It served to prove what I had always known: that we were not remotely compatible and never had been. If and when the day came, he wanted his bride to wear a business suit. We would not have worked on any kind of level.
Aside from misjudging his…
The tale of a holiday romance gone right.
I often tell people that Tom and I met in Florida. We didn’t, but we might as well have done. Florida was where we had our first meaningful conversations, where I got to know him, and where I discovered that my first impression of him could not have been more inaccurate. It was a trip I almost didn’t go on, and had I not, I am fairly certain we would not be together now.
Tom and I had actually met three times before, but for various reasons, I had paid him precisely zero attention. If, on any of those occasions…
Most of us have one, don’t we?
The one that got away,
The one we will wonder about
Until our dying day…
We don’t wish we were still with them,
Or want another go,
The problem is uncertainty-
The fact we just don’t know…
We do not know what might have been,
How far me might have got,
If the ending was inevitable,
Maybe, maybe not…
If we’d said this or done that,
Might the outcome have been swayed?
Could they have been persuaded?
Might they actually have stayed?
We tie our minds in sailor’s knots Thus fashioning our own…
It was a tale as old as the town itself. No one knew how the story of the monster in the well first came about. All they knew was that the well in the woods behind Southcote Farm was said to be home to an immortal being with a rather unusual way of feeding. Instead of food, the monster supposedly fed on the unsavoury opinions of those who visited the well. Of course, most people didn’t believe it, but that didn’t stop parents from using the story as a way of teaching their little ones to watch their words.
‘You…
Lauren Phillips
Lauren Phillips is a language teacher and writer with a deep love of words in all their forms. She uses writing to help her process her own tangled thoughts.
