Stop Making Sense

Sometimes I feel like a Nomad. There is no place I can truly call home. I did have a home once, in Leeds where I was born and grew up with my mother and father. Those were happy times. I was an only child but I played with neighbourhood friends and i-friends, just like mathematicians play with imaginary numbers. I felt secure, my house belonged to me, there was a balance between the authoritarianism of my father and the severity of my mother. I remember one Sunday morning playing with a ball-point pen while lying in bed just curiously trying to figure out how it worked. I was about 5 years old at the time. Suddenly, something went radically wrong and I accidently made a long mark in ink along my mother's prized faux-sheepskin sheets. So, never one to panic, I calmly licked my fingers and tried to rub the mark out. Ha! That's when I discovered the Eighth-Wonder of the world: the permanence of ink! This ink mark just wouldn't budge, infact it smudged until it turned into a blue-hazy smear. The more I rubbed it with wet finger tips, the more it spread out with different densities of blue creating an atmospheric "sky" effect. I didnt know it then but ten years later I would find out that what I was doing at 5 was known as the sfumato technique, the one Leonardo Da Vinci perfected on the Mona Lisa. lol. That's not what my irascible mother thought. Never mind sfumato, she went fuming mad! I had been playing with an INK PEN in bed on HER SHEEPSKIN SHEETS????!!!! She beat me with a slipper, a shoe and worst of all- a hard rock-like mineral that felt like murder (It's made of calcium and comes covered in a thin layer of elastic so it hurts and stings at the same time) - yes, a HAND. At the time I was so sorry I had ever been born with the curse of curiosity. If only I had never woke up that morning I thought, I wouldn't have had to be murdered with a star-fish shaped rock. But then my father came running up the stairs to see why his son was screaming like he was being stoned to death and why my mother was shouting like she'd just found out her son had died in a car accident: NOOOOOOOOOO! When he found out that it was over a little bit of ink on a meaningless bedsheet, he just calmly said: "It's alright, we'll buy another one." And that was the end of it, my life was spared. Not that we ever did buy another one, there was no need, afterall the ink mark came out with a few washes and my previously unknown talent at sfumato was never used again. For fear of my own safety. lol.