Good Evening, Traveller

I am stepping through the computer screen, and I am reaching out for you to pull you through. Take my hand?

I am faceless to you. I am almost and imagining. But my hand and yours are linked together, and I am pulling you through to my side of the screen.

Just look there, I say, this faceless stranger who's blog you just happened to stumble across, and who, quite suddenly, has lured you to somewhere else. Vaguely you are thinking how rude this is, so you only half hear what I say, but you are curious too, and when I gesture through the screen, to the figure at a wooden desk, you follow my hand awkwardly.

There at the desk (it is strewn with pieces of paper, you notice; two gluesticks rise from the white foliage like thick shoots, there is a tangle of measuring tape curled to the side, a ruler and a pair of scissors half-submerged and half-visible, alongside small bricks of blue tissue-packets.) sits a girl who isn't looking at you, and for some reason you cannot help but to wonder what colours her eyes are.

She is a mop of red hair to you - a tangled, messy mop - and she is carefully cutting and pasting in a peaceful, distant way.

You realise she is slowly binding herself a book.

You don't know how you reached this conclusion, but you are right. The girl with the red hair is binding herself a book.

She is making, at the moment, envelopes for the book. She cuts out a folded piece of paper, and then glues little accordian-like folded bits to the inside edges, making the envelope bigger. While you watch her, she folds up, carefully so as not to tear the fragile paper (why is she using such fragile paper?), a piece of paper torn from an old copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe into another concertina, and glues it to an old envelope.

Why is she binding a book?

She is making a book because she is thoroughly fed up with searching for the perfect notebook elsewhere. And she has decided to make her own.

So she sits there, still not looking at you because she doesn't even know you are there, completely in harmony for the time in her surroundings. Ovals of light, little rainbows, whirl backwards and forth continously as sunlight ( the first for weeks) is scattered by a crystal hanging in her window, which is behind her.

You want to know what colours her eyes are. You want to know if it is silent there where she is, because it looks so, but all you can hear is the whirr of her laptop and the clicking of keyboard keys from somewhere you can't see.

Then, I am leading you away again. I am taking you back to where you were before. I tug at your conciousness and you follow effortlessly, as if you really did want to return, and not keep watching the girl with the red hair, binding a book, with eyes unknown to you.

Noise. What noises surround you?

Listen for a moment, tell me what they are.













And now, you are back.

The girl is gone.