Small plates vs platters.

I'm attempting to write from prompts. I don't know if my pieces will always be true stories, but I'll try and be honest with you readers. Today I am trying #15 from Jericho Writers' Memoir-Writing prompts page, which I was originally linked to when I did my second course at Hastings Writers Workshop, and have had sitting comfortably in my collection of neglected tabs ever since. Here's the first post I did with this loose framework. This is the next. 

Photo by Wallace Chuck

50. Use metaphors and similes. Need to write about war? Perhaps you could pick out the tale of two neighbours on opposite sides of the conflict. Want to describe a complex emotion? Try comparing your own experience to something with which a reader may be familiar. 

First of all, I hate using war analogies. As someone who has lived through a cancer experience, let me tell you, the battle/warrior/fight terminology is overdone and tacky. Stop it. Okay, moving on... 

This is when I open WhatsApp on my browser - which feels wrong on so many levels and in so many tabs - and find a message I sent to a good friend recently. 'Good friend' here meaning very dear to me, but also very good at all the things. She's an incredibly articulate and intelligent self-described 'half-arse human'. Well, the other day we were catching up (read as: exchanging 5-10 minute voice notes with recent life updates, then sending photos with no captions that would make sense upon listening to these clips and snippets of life audio) and I described my life as chaos, something I like to do quite a lot. I have a Drama degree, after all. 

'CHAOS, but we move,' I texted. 

'What's life without a LITTLE chaos!?' the friend replied. 

My reply came; 'for sure. but I want to deal exclusively in small plates of chaos, I can't be doing with these sharing platters.'

I received a heart emoji reaction to the message, and felt quietly proud of what I'd created in my own mind and how I'd communicated it to this other person, who'd understood instantly. I didn't need to go any deeper into the metaphor, which is good, because it would have fallen apart very quickly. 

I wonder how the small plates could pile up, though. Surely that would eventually outweigh the perfectly arranged platter, and get messier. Also, you can share a platter with someone else, which is a politeness minefield but also a weight off - someone else can assist with the excess chickpeas and soft spinach leaves. 

What if the chaos was like a sushi shop conveyer belt in its constant movement, where you could pluck small plates quite comfortably from where you were sitting and assess the level of damage they'd do to your mind's budget based on colour rather than size - a synaesthesia sufferer's dream! But after a while they'd start to form a tower at the end of the table, you'd see the cost start to add up; sauce from one dish would spill onto another as you tried to neatly arrange them in colour order only to find that they didn't quite fit on top of each other as you'd once thought they could. 

Did I murder this metaphor? Maybe. 

Thanks for reading.

G. x