Got nice comments over at Quills for this so I am reposting here...

[riotheclown]

The prompt was to choose any song and use it for inspiration so I picked Neil Young's "Helpless" after hearing K.D. Lang sing it.
"Helpless"

Tom Tompson paints northern Ontario like nobody's business!


There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless.

791 words follow, two swears, no violence...

There is a cool dampness in a land full of trees that is always the same. It marks the body-memory with its scent and when you return it grabs you in the tender parts. You don't like it but you love it too. Like wasted days, worth nothing but you know you miss them.

It was a long drive to get there. Life in the city had got her so wound up for so long "normal" seemed preposterously ponderous. She was a bitch but if she never ventured too far away from the frenetic pace that was her life she felt it worked for her. Yet here she was standing at the bottom of the hill that had to be walked, bags in tow, to get to the cabin, the place where all her changes were.

This place. You knew when you arrived it would lay itself open to you, let you find what you needed in silence that was so full it made you realize you missed television because of how it shut you out.
In dappled light that teased her vision, so much life was constantly quivering.

He would not come to meet her.

On his best day he would not have come. She had to want to be there. The trouble she had to go through just to get there ended any conversation about what she wanted from him before it began. That is not to say he was ungenerous. He was more than generous.

"I thought this part of my life was over", and he wept in her arms as if she had given him something when the truth was, no one had ever thought that much about her to be so touched. He bought her paints and canvas and told her one day, "I don't have anything more I can teach you, you know how to paint, just paint." And when she got crazy drunk and ranted things she knew she should not have ranted, he cleaned up her vomit and the next day let her be alone. She did penance by rigorously cleaning the cabin, shunning the beauty outside for her version of a good Acadian piety. And he never reminded her of it, not once.

There was plenty of space if you needed to be alone, two hundred acres of pre-Cambrian shield, not good for much but beautiful: The Great Canadian Artist's dream. A regular Tom Thompson's playground.

He was generous also in that he never pretended to have any answers for her. He could admit he was fucked up, that he liked her body and didn't mind the scars, liked that she didn't talk too much and could enjoy a good sunset; That he was close to being in love with her and that was something. He was twenty years older than her, (the same age as she was now) and yet she was the oldest woman he had ever been with, thirty-five, imagine? Groupies, all of them, she supposed, but one of them had broken his heart. No fool like an old fool.

Sometimes she would think that he was everyman and she was everywoman and when they made love they made love as the composite of all lovers making love. Each meal they ate together, every sun rise and sun set they watched was as the first and last for all humanity.

This place told her, that even when she lost herself it would remember her. It told her that every person who would come to this place would wear like a shimmering wakefulness her own wakefulness. As a loon would break from the surface of the lake and take flight, the beating of its wings would be her heart, in each startled heart that would ever witness the scene.

Such beauty and generosity could undermine the most steadfast bitch. She didn't like it. She didn't like it at all. She remembered what she had screamed at him when she was drunk: Feeling safe with him made her feel afraid.

She knew that as strong as she had become, she was helpless here in this place that would always remember him.