Throwback Thursday Week #17
Morning, Prosers,
It's that time of the week again where we recap the goings-on around Prose, or as we have all grown to know it: Throwback Thursday!
It has been a whole week since we launched The Prose Collections and we have had an overwhelmingly positive response from you all! Thank you all so much for your feedback, and your patience while we iron out the kinks.
With any new update, we expect there to be bugs that we have missed; we might be pretty damn awesome, but even we aren't perfect! So, if you find any bugs, or have any questions / feedback, please get in touch.
Last week saw the first Five Friend Friday where Paul shared his piece, "The Black Dog." This week, Karen will be telling us all which piece she chose to share and why. We'd love for you all to get involved; remember, if you don't want your work to be shared, please use the hashtag #noshare.
Given the launch of one of our biggest updates ever, we have seen a massive increase of users joining us. We have had the biggest amount of sign-ups this week since the birth of Prose. We are growing at such an incredible rate that we can hardly contain our excitement; it's such a wonderful thing to watch fellow creatives congregate and get behind our passion and what we want to achieve. We'd like to remind you all about the Introduction Portal, if you're new here, introduce yourselves and if you're a seasoned Proser we know you'll be on hand to make them feel at home.
The Letters From Prison initiative is going absolutely amazingly. Giving the women of HMP Peterborough a voice, is the most rewarding part of our jobs to date. We have had one resident tell us that since she started doing this, her mental health has improved, the health professionals are decreasing their visits with her, she has stopped self-harming, and she has noted a huge increase in her confidence. This is all down to the feedback you guys have given her. We are so touched at the generosity of this community, as are the inmates.
The staff of the prison are beginning to get involved and Monday will see a blog piece written by one of the prison guards; but, while we have your attention, there is one quote we must share with you now, straight from their fingers and something that sums this all up so nicely.
"Sometimes all it takes is for someone to believe in you to make a difference."
Not only do we feel this perfectly sums up how we feel about the Letters from Prison initiative, but how we feel about Prose too. A huge community coming together, relating to one another, encouraging and supporting one another, believing in one another, regardless of what our backgrounds are, our beliefs, our religion and race, our sexuality.
What truly shines through here is our huge love for words, the power they have to change a life, and the relationships we build herein.
More power to you guys, our absolutely awesome community. Words cannot convey how much each and every one of you mean to us.
Until next time, Prosers.
Prose.
Deja Vu
My first kiss was on a roller-coaster. Her name was Sandra, she had blue eyes, brown hair and a single freckle on her nose that was the only embellishment on a perfectly clear, pale face.
We had been dating for three weeks. After three months of clumsy flirting between classes, it was only after I was already madly in love with her that I asked her out. Not that she ever knew that.
We held hands on all the drops, and when we were suspended upside down on the largest loop, two thirds of the way through, she leaned over and planted a kiss directly on my lips.
"Don't be scared," She mouthed over the rush of wind and the delighted screams of the other riders.
"I'm not." I mouthed back, grabbing her hand a little tighter, feeling the delicate bones wrap around mine, a lock clicking into place.
We stepped off the ride still holding hands, and on the drive home she fell asleep in the back of my mom's white minivan, our hands clasped still. I watched her sleep all the way home.
"Don't you have your own life? Your own dreams?" She said one morning, eating her cereal on the other side of the table from me. She tapped her spoon against the side of the bowl as she ate, tap tap tap.
"Of course I do," I said slowly, not knowing if this was going to be a fight or a conversation.
She blinked and looked up at me, her eyes blank, "Then what are you doing?"
We had this conversation before, and I hadn't had an answer then. Now was no different.
"I'm going to work." Is all I managed to say before I bolted out the front door to my car.
Her name was Susan and we met at work.
She had blonde hair and brown eyes, with a splattering of freckles across her cheeks. I walked by her desk exactly once a week, to get supplies from the supply room for the rest of my department.
The first week she smiled at me, the second week she told me her name, and for every week after that I learned something new about her. She liked cats, and water-slides. She hated roller-coasters.
We had our first kiss in the supply room.
"Don't be scared," she whispered in the dark, her breath hot against my lips.
"I'm not," I replied, reaching to hold her hand in mine.
"When are you going to demand that raise?" Susan said, sitting across the dinner table from me, picking at her plain spinach salad with her fingers.
"I don't know, once I'm settled. The money doesn't really matter to me."
"Don't you want things? Don't you have dreams? I want to live in a house someday you know."
"Of course, I know." I replied, stepping toward the door as I spoke.
Her name was Sara and I met her at church.
She had black hair and olive skin, her nose had a bend in it from when she broke it falling out of a tree years before. I only ever saw her smile when she was looking at me.
"I had a dream that I lived in a tent on the beach in Norway," She said one day, as I walked her to her car like I had been doing for the past three months.
"Oh yeah?" I replied, laughing.
"I think I'm going to do it."
"Do what?" I opened the car door for her as she climbed in.
"I just told you, go live on the beach in Norway."
"But...why?" I was sure she was joking.
She sighed, "Well, what do you dream about?"
Our eyes met and I felt my heart stutter.
"Mostly you," I replied impulsively, leaning in to kiss her on her pale pink lips. She frowned, pulling away.
"Nothing else?"
I looked her in the eyes and saw Susan and Sandra layered over her face, although they looked nothing alike.
I couldn't think of anything to say as she drove away.
I kissed Sheila at the bar the night I met her. I was halfway between a sentence when she drunkenly stumbled into my arms for a kiss. I felt uneasy, and maybe she could tell because she told me not to be scared as she pulled me by the hand out of the bar into the taxi.
I told her I wasn't.
We clasped hands in the bed, and when I cried out I said Sandra's name.
"Who's Sandra?" She said, not sounding mad, but pulling away from my touch.
"Just a dream," I slurred, leaning in to kiss her again, "Nobody who matters."
She gave me a look, "Maybe you should find a new dream."
"I have dreams!" I said defensively, for the first time realizing it was a lie. For the first time I realized every girl was Sandra and every roller-coaster ends after the biggest loop.
I spent that night looking at old pictures, drinking a handle of rum to myself. I had more pictures of me and Sandra than anyone else, because we went so many places.
She had given me an empty scrapbook for our one year anniversary and I had kept adding pictures of us throughout our relationship.
The last picture in the book was only halfway through the pages. It was Sandra and I at the beach, our hands barely touching. I pulled it out of its sleeve to look at it and glimpsed some writing on the back I had never seen before.
"The worst lies are the ones you tell yourself. -S"
And I realized for the first time I had never really had any other dreams.
