She has designs on Once Upon A Time

A whole lifetime ago when I was seventeen and even more pretentious than I am now (if you can believe such a thing to be possible) I used to write. You know, the usual sort of thing, terrible poetry and stories in good need of an editor to remove every second adjective. Every now and again I still feel maudlin enough to (metaphorically) leaf back through the archives of my teenage self importance. I was doing so this evening with more purpose than usual, without wishing to sound too melodramatic I was genuinely unhappy as a child for any number of reasons relating to being the kind of girl who could use words with more than three sylables and loved tweed but some of the worst times were all tied up with the church in one way or another. Trying to be part of a church community again even with the best of intentions is reminding me in a very vivid way what it used to be to feel like that and so I don't think that I should have to suffer alone. Here is one of the least offensive extracts I came across and no I don't know how I made it all the way to adulthood without being giving a clip round the ear either;

"Once upon a time, she thinks, is not a good beginning. It's too indecisive. Is it once upon a time last week? Last year? Years and years ago? When was there ever a time big enough for all of those wicked witches and brave knights and golden apples. Will there ever be a time for them again? More than anything this disasociative time gives the stories liscense to end Happily Ever After. Why, she wonders, did they give us faerie tales. Now we have nothing else to pass on, nothing useful or true.

She spins the world around words, Once Upon A Time there was. Once upon a time there was a. Once upon a time there was a princess. Once upon a time there was a wicked witch. Once upon a time there was a princess who could not stand the sight of apples. They always seem too full, gluttinous little things. They are too obviously openly tempting, shining in crisp autumn colours, in greens and yellows and bright fresh reds. Nothing good has ever come of eating apples, knowledge of good and evil, sleep in a glass coffin. She thinks that from the inside, in the garden, in her head, there must have seemed to be no barriers at all. Once upon a time there was a wicked witch who could not stand the sight of the princess who could not stand the sight of apples. Once upon a time there was an orchard, and safety and peace. Once upon a time there was a king who could refuse his daughter nothing. Once upon a time there were sharp axes, and there was a woman weeping, and blood, and fire and the apples watching slyly. Once upon a time there was grief. Once upon a time there was revenge, and a spindle, and splinters, and a princess who died screaming.

She twists words, similes, metaphors, structure, takes pleasure in sound, baulks at the smell of apples."

Oh dear.