A lot of things have happened in the last year and we felt like a fresh beginning was certainly necessary. If you’d like to continue following the Joe and the Sienna then please join us over at Somersault Love.
We’re awfully sorry we’ve been gone so long but we do hope you can forgive us.
Bonjour!
We haven’t been very on-the-ball with posting posts since Joe got back to England – to anybody who’s missing the daily updates, we do apologize! Things have been hectic – but more importantly than that, we talked about Fidget and Squeak for a while and came to a decision. We’re a bit new to blogging, so at the outset of F&S we decided that having a joint relationship-and-creativity blog wouldn’t be too broad of a category.
How wrong we were.
Good blogs have a very specific focus – ours isn’t focused enough. So Joe and I have decided we’re going to split Fidget and Squeak in two – one half will be the relationship blog, and one will be the creativity blog. That way people who are interested in either/or can go straight to the material they want without having to look through the rest of the posts.
As previously mentioned, things are moving a little fast right now, so please bear with us while we figure out what to put where!
L’amour toujours,
-F&S
I got a chance to go back in time
And took it.
Now every day I relive the same mistakes
Feel those familiar pains
And make all the same screw-ups
I’ve never been happier.
These here are five letters.
During the later portion of my stay with Sienna in Canada, I fixed these lovely things up as a surprise for her. While she was out at school I numbered them 1-5 and wrote simply in some form or another, ‘Do not open until all five have been found’ on the front of each. Then I hid them.
A while after she was home, I told her to pick a book off the shelf for me that I had been reading a few days before. She did so and instantly the first of these letters popped out.
Her eyes widened. Then like a fiend she shot around the room trying to find them all. It was a lot of fun to watch, and perhaps if I didn’t give so many clues I could have enjoyed watching for longer. Eventually, though, she found them all and began opening them from 1.
Inside these letters are something I wrote a while ago. It’s a detailed description of everything that is perfect about Sienna’s physical form in my opinion, missing no specific. She liked it an awful lot, needless to say.
This surprise was the third of three during my trip. Stay tuned to see what the others were!
Dear Joe,
I finished reading Lauren Oliver’s book, “Delirium,” today. I had no idea it would affect me so much – I’m still so angry, even now. Absolutely furious. And hurt.
It was a great read.
Like I’ve told you, the book is about a dystopian version of the USA – one that has decreed that love is a disease, amor deliria nervosa, and that the only way to live free and untroubled is to cure it. They cure people of love once they turn eighteen. It’s to protect people, they say: to keep them safe, and content. Love kills you when you have it, and when you don’t, they say, and so it’s better not to have it.
It’s horrible. And so provocative. There’s no emotion anywhere – the surgical procedure tears into your brain and roots it out. They don’t just remove the foolish, irrational, insensible sort of love, they remove the love between friends, between families. A man’s dog is beaten to near-death by a patrol of government raiders and he just lets it die on the street. It made me sick – in fact a lot of the book did, which is why it was so incredible. The punch it packs is so powerful.
One of the main characters (you’d like him) says that “hate isn’t the most dangerous thing. Indifference is.” I agree so wholeheartedly. Negative emotions are what make the positive ones so good – “you can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes.” This society cuts the heart right out of you and I hated it and I loved it, because in the end? It reminded me of how lucky I am to have you. How lucky we are to love each other so, so much, even though we’re young, and to be allowed to do it. Affection isn’t illegal here.
Read the book. You’ll probably get angrier than I did. And you’ll love every second of it.
Ton petit chou,
~Sienna
Specifically, ours. I wrote this a long while ago and wanted to find the perfect time to post it, as it’s very personal to both Joe and myself. I think now, when we’re both still aching from the sudden loss of the other, is a good time.
I hope it uplifts you, honey.
In Which She Addresses the Boy at the Other End of the Paper Doll Chain
One day a child named God
Gathered every fibre they could find
Every shred of paper
Every scrap of fabric
Every slip of flimsy, pretty something
Fastened them all together
Carved a billion bodies from them with safety scissors
And then with an ingenuous grin and a clumsy flourish
Flung them wide
From one end of their bedroom—
With its fluffy carpet underfoot
And its bouncy bed with the springy, overstuffed mattress
And its primary-colour paintjob—
To the other.And here we’ve hung ever since.
But surely you know all this
For you were there too;
But it has been an awfully long time since
And I’ve heard down the paper grapevine that your memory
Is not as sharp as the edges of our bodies
And I remember that day as clear as cellophane, you know.I must confess,
That when that child swung their baby-fat arms up and out
To toss us to the corners of the walls
I saw you:
The only other doll
Without a second hand to hold
For yours was destined to be pinned through
Cold and useless
(And yet the most useful thing in the world)
Like mine.
And of course in that moment I knew you were special
And of course in that second I knew you were unique
And of course
In that instant
I knew you’d be lonely as I was cut out to be.But it was only when,
For the merest fraction of a second,
In a flurry of giftwrap and velvet and papyrus
Your face peeked through the gap in two
And we locked eyes
That I knew for certain I loved you.And as the time has passed
I have closely watched the way
The fingers of your barren hand
Clench and curl as if they are convulsing
From the loss they feel
From the phantom pains of a birthright they never received
From the longing
The need
To have a life and a warmth to fill that empty palm—
So I am fairly certain
The feeling is mutual.Myself I am made
From scraps of silk
And an old and textured journal page
Whose slanted
Elegant
Amethyst writings
Have literally sunken into me
Seeped their ink into the backs of my knees
The crook of my neck
The cruxes of my pale little elbows
And made me centuries wiser than by all rights I ought to be.And you?
I haven’t the faintest
What slip of pretty, flimsy something
You are made from
I like to think it’s a frank and forthright bookpage
Or else some whimsical piece of sheet music
For you have always seemed to me
The sort of person with something to say
And besides,
When a summer wind whips through the window
And sends us all aflutter
I’ve always thought your rustling
The prettiest.And how often I do fantasize
About letting myself get caught
In that warm and joyous zephyr
About swirling out of sight
About living like a leaf in trees
Where the warm, rough bark can be my solid ground
And Chinese lanterns all my harvest moons.
But the wind cuts right though
My tissue-paper dress;
My wafer-thin limbs shiver in the chill
And I figure
If you were to come with me
I would stand more of a chance against the cold.
For I have heard you are quite resilient
And also quite warm.I think they mean your body
But I know it’s in your soul.And maybe my sense of humour is just twisted
But I find it side-stitchingly funny
That even though I am the farthest from you
I still see you better than the rest:
Everybody has always thought you hard as cardstock
But I have seen your body
In ricepaper lines
With all your delicate veins and secrets
Just barely hidden under lucent sheets.
And for some reason that child took the care
To draw my eyes on beautiful and dark and sharp as the nib
Of the pen that they drew them with
So to me the message scrawled across your face
Across the room
Is plain as day:
“I don’t want to be here, either.”So come on.
Let’s escape from it all.
Give the responsibility of holding up the world
To some other eager pair;
Cut ourselves free
And float all the way down to Earth
Pick ourselves up on pulpy, printed legs
Meet in the middle of that fluffy carpet
And finally say hello.Did you know, your lips don’t taste of fibres.
They taste of freedom.We can pack ourselves crêpe paper for lunch
Grab a roll of tape to wrap around our wrists
For windy days
And then soft as a whisper
Slip through the crack in the door
Never to be seen here again.I’ll use a drinks umbrella like a parasol
And wear confetti flowers in my hair;
You can read the cracked and ancient words
Printed on the pieces of me I can’t quite reach
And tell me what they say.
We’ll live in an origami house
Delicate and slight
Wafting to and fro on a string in the breeze
Bright like a jewel
So carefully composed
You’re almost scared to touch it;
Where our conversations will become pretty patterns on the walls
Where our laughter will set the whole foundation aflutter
And where I can fold us cranes as pets
And the secrets that we breathe into them
Will enable them
To fly.
With love and love and love,
~Sienna
Yeah, this means that I am back at ‘home’ in England now. Gosh, it really just does not feel like home without you here, sweet.
We got my stuff together last night and, at about seven in the evening, we left Sienna’s house in her father’s car on our way to the airport. Although this goodbye was easier than the others, that’s not to say it didn’t hurt. A lot. When I touched down two weeks ago we collided with each other like an elastic band stretched further than it should. Now I can feel that ache as I’m being stretched again, and I know Sienna is feeling the exact same feeling.
This is tough. This is laborious. Even when we get the chance to be together, we do so with the slowly descending weight in our chest that tells us it won’t last forever. It won’t even last long.
Anyway, onwards and upwards.
Sienna has been kind enough to update our countdown clock to July 10th. That’s the day she arrives here in England and is also ten days before my birthday. We’ve already started counting down, because you know what?
It helps.
