March | 2018 | Janey L Foster

In a park, somewhere in an old deep green and bristled wood, there was a car. It was an old car, corners had rust and the seats had seen better days but it still worked. And although the miles had built up on the clock, it still drove quite well, well enough to bring him to her door.

They sat in the car, her hair waving and him in the driving seat with his list of objectives and plans. They talked. They always talked and here in the car, near the car park at the swimming baths, they sat and talked about Stephen Hawking.

She didn’t have much time for scientists, not in those days and she listened to him chatter and enthuse. It all seemed so alien to her, so remote from her ways and her thoughts.

There in a park, far from where she was now, they would sit and think about knowledge, argue over the unknowable and as lunchtime turned towards afternoon, she promised to read the book.

A Brief History of Time became their bible and on distant settees far from his, she made notes and she frowned at the pages. And as weeks became months and strangeness seeped into familiarity, she found her way.

Planets crept into her soul and atomic mass with all its inherent uncertainty became the conversations of a Sunday night. How odd it seemed that she grew to follow his ways, his words and yet now, leaning up the kitchen cupboard, how strange it was that there could have been any other way than this one.

This was the way and they knew it at a cellular level, and certainty was woven into every interaction and every dream.

And years later their son was on his way home, top deck, front seat of a double decker. And the trees brushed past the glass that held him and his college bag was heavy with unseen words.

She thought back to first of the parks and his old car and all the talking. There seemed to be no passage of time between now and who they were back then.

Stephen Hawking had bent the fabric of their spacetime and they rolled into each other with a permanece that was unknown to them, back there, back then in the car.

In the now, the bus with their child came nearer and she thought of the worlds that had changed. And in an echo of the car wheels turning was their son playing out all the maths, their boy calculating and rejoicing in calculus and if he could, he’d have sat in the back of the car in the past and shown his parents the workings out. There, on his pure white page was the algebra to the split screen experiment and equations for Schrödinger’s cat.

In a park, in a car many light years away from here they all sat, together. And they were unaware of this day unfolding as they read, as they talked, as they laughed.

Back then it wasn’t like this. Back then I didn’t feel the bite of this harsh wind, I didn’t have the urge to be outside, to feel the cold at all my edges and return, flooded by the warmth of the lounge.

Back then I didn’t feel anything.

Back then, there’d been no snow, not for months at least and the last time the snow had fallen we were soft, we were round and plump and full of beans but that was then. Then, when winter came it was just a season, it was something to note and to turn from. But then it changed.

Sometime back then it stopped becoming only a season, a front of weather and nothing more. Back then it stopped. Abrupt. Savaged and severed and when I woke all the weather had gone. Back then and not now where weather used to live, there was my soul. There was a shifting churning swathe of everything I felt. No one knew of course, it was a passing storm for them, a raincloud in their day but for me it was an extension of my mind.

I don’t remember what others call weather back then, I just know it didn’t snow. I didn’t wear a coat but then again temperatures were irrelevant to me, external events were just that. There was outside of me where the others lived but they were absent, distant beings who orbited my world and there was me.

I became everything, every atom that existed, every colour, taste and sound and there on that day back then, that isn’t this snow threatened day right now, back then when what others referred to as the weather came, I was oblivious. I was turning, breathing, pulsing through my land – but nothing more.

I remember black, shapes of people, blurring. Some chrome catching light from a fusion reaction and my hands. I remember my hands, I think. Small and pale at the ends of my arms. My top was long and flowed around what was left of my form and there were faces.

Faces came close, came and went or rushed away. Perfume seeped around me, unknown aftershave and the pressure of a hug. I could smell their hair as they leaned into me, strangers. Why were there so many strangers and their mouths moved and they said words but nothing I could hear.

I was there, so others told me and I moved amongst them, through them down an aisle we’d visited long ago. Long before I changed shape, long-time-hours before that day. And in that place that we used to know, we didn’t see that I would be there, that I would sit at the front and look up.

I’d sit up straight, too straight, as though my life depended on it and it did and I’d stare out of my body, up and away through the coloured window to the hills we used to walk – but no one knew.

They passed through while I stopped and altered, while I morphed into someone else and back then, it didn’t snow. There was no bite to my hands and nose, no sense to wrap up warm, there was just the day, the place, the minutes rolling, hours and the hardness of the seat.

This seat is hard now but I am home. I am not there and I watch the robin watching me. His birdbath has frozen again, despite the top up of luke warm water. A snowstorm is heading in. I remember a time when I used to react to the weather, when it lived outside of my form and then I changed. Back then, in that minute when there ceased to be any separation between me and this world.

I became the weather and now I blow. I move and change, a constant swirl of shifting energy and now I’m winter, now I’m frost. Everything is an extension of me and here comes snow. I am gentle and white, I make you stop and take note.

I sit down and watch myself. Back then it didn’t snow. Sun came through the windows, probably and I breathed and that was all.

And now I sit and watch my changing feelings. I expand and fill. Back then for a while there was weather but not now, now I am this white out winter world.

I am my snow.