This is my copywriting piece about the death of my previous self and the rebirth of ‘Pip’. This is the same theme I have applied to the Missing posters. When you become a carer the old-you goes missing, you’re replaced with someone entirely new, a husk of yourself in the carers case due to the isolation of the role.
Phillipa went missing in the dry summer of 97. A painfully shy and sensitive soul. She was but a small girl that hid behind a muzzle of sheepskin with one soggy thumb buried in her face. Dearly loved by her parents and two wild sisters, who tied up tickled and refrigerated her, she will be mostly missed.
Strangely enough on that very same 90’s summer’s day a new kid, blew in on a stirring Northwesterly wind. As the clouds arched and dipped obliging the winds aggression so too did the craning heads. Soon enough the small-town Templeton folks forgot about meek missing Phill…what’s-her-name. Yes Pip parked up square in between her 2 sisters, one bad ass fiery redhead and her older sister, the genius.
Her sisters were simply 2 hard lessons along a shifty footpath of many. The clever lessons listed in high school, well now they were only necessary. Science kept her curious, the French weren’t that friendly, English was a semi-large question that almost got it right but Art. Art knew her in that expecting, familiar way you might know if you ever found yourself in a hallway full of doors and somehow know where the garage is, the toilet and the bedrooms. Pip grew to trust this feeling that made missing-Phillipa whince.
Art dared Pip. When Phillipa had chosen the pencil, Pip unsheathed a pastel and made no apology for the mania her Art secreted over the tame page. Art sang to Pip what it had whispered to Phillipa.
Whisked up in the dream of it all Pip followed this Art up a steep path to Wellington where Phillipa would have hidden in her mother’s skirt had she not been missing for all those years. Pip made a home in shifting houses and claiming new friends. Tragically Art was higher maintenance in this gyre of a town and cheated on her in an expectantly defeated way.
Pip slumped to her routine and found her small steps stride wider to a different rhythm of art buried in words, and words, and words. And Phillipa found Pip there hanging off the end of a white boardroom table ‘who wants to go first?’ asks her teacher as Phillipa’s mustered courage droles through a noose of sentences.
phillipaolivia 