Tag Archives: Time

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Tucked Away

The radiator warmed the back of her thighs as the winter afternoon crept towards night. She waited for the tightness to ease out, for her muscles to relax. It had been such a bright day but she needed rain.

She wanted that cold, end-of-year rain to bounce off the supermarket car park tarmac, for the lights to fracture and sparkle like they did, for car tail-lights to be the only colour as she walked, as she headed to the pharmacy.

…

Her red fleece top kept out the cold but not the rain and of course she didn’t care. Rushing around the aisles afterwards, her right pocket stuffed, she patted it to keep it safe. She rustled, she became oblivious to rain, such that it became her well loved trademark.

And later, a little later, back home, she was the one who fractured and sparkled. She sat on the sofa and in the soft glow of the TV babble she felt like she lit up the room. 

…

She left the heat of the radiator and peeped outside to the blackness. Make it rain, she whispered to her window, to her street. Make it rain. Please.

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Six-Cornered-Starlet

It’s early, from my window I can tell it snowed over night. I have no curtains up now, nothing to block out the sun when it comes. 

Outside there are fresh ice crystals, six cornered stars and a thick layer that coats the streets, that demands to be looked at but not right now.

Underneath it, is the névé from a four year storm. Some of it has melted and reformed but it lies there, foundational, quiet and underpinning this new whiteout.

Deeper still, the firn, compacted, dense and undeniable.  I know it’s there of course, the core of my landscape. I have learned to walk on it by now, my boots are rugged, my legs are strong and when I fall, which I do, I grasp onto trees trunks and heave myself back up. I bleed and bruise but blood dries up and bruises fade.

Through the easy aperture, the room floods with light but I try not to rise from my bed, though I will. I don’t want to look out of my window, I want to pull the duvet over my head and push myself down into the mattress and hide away.

I won’t look from my window, not yet. The brightness floods in regardless, memories of carrots and coal, laughter, spiralled breath on the air.  Transient and magical, like something to cherish, to hold. Then just cold. It disperses back to the atmosphere, to be inhaled, to go around again.

Under the fresh snow the névé blurs over firn. The firn, almost glacial ice now. Years bleed into each-other, crystals creating new shapes and forms. If I pause, stop. I can feel the ice emerge, hear the minutes growing into time.

Time, when this firn was fresh snow, when my bewildered eyes couldn’t look at it. When tears turned to icicles and stalactites on my face.

Now it’s solid firn, deep underneath. Sometimes I go out, sometimes I can even skate, I cut patterns with my blades, decorate the landscape, spin and swirl. I dance.

But not today.

Today the fresh snow lies heavy over it all. Every flake, every crystal demanding to be known. 

I nestle down under the duvet for now. It’s treacherous out there. Drifts upon drifts, ice upon ice. Dangerous. But it is mine. 

In time I’ll build snowmen again. 

xxx

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Time Dilation #5

I suppose it was me and the clock, me and the concerned faces, me breathing and counting and getting nowhere. I suppose I don’t like being told that I can’t do something, so I try even harder for a while. A sense that to give up would be to fail.

Now I can feel it’s me talking from exhaustion (much like this morning, in this world now.) A sense of the pressure I put on myself, but then as now, sooner or later, I gave in, gave myself up to it all. 

I remember the nurse or maybe he was a consultant? (It wasn’t Johnny V, we never saw him again, with his slicked back black hair and pristine striped shirt) but someone apologised to me and my determination broke free from my eyes, rolled in spheres down my hot flushed cheeks. 

I guess the rest of the evening was spent in the theatre, but no aisle seat for me that time. I was centre stage, I was the whole ensemble, I was the diva under their lights and clamps and curtains. My abdomen sang wide, glorious and while they hurried, tinkered and sewed the gash, I loved him in my bloodied arms. 

Home.

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Ephemeris

I have been avoiding myself for a while, she thought, but the leaves rushed in and said don’t worry. Watch us dither on the bluster, see how we don’t care.

And she strained her head to the sky, to the spaces where she used to be and watched. They maundered like old thoughts which caught her out in the night, like missed moments, like the regrets which crumbled at her door, twisted and fragile, the haphazard seconds of her life.

But the leaves taught her well. They cried out as they tumbled into her, thither-zither, helter-skelter to her palms. And for those which remained on the trees, she poured her love up to them. They were weary, clumped and battered on the undressed branch. They knew not to resist.

Clouds moved in, cumulus caressed her mind and she didn’t care, not really. Not now. Somehow the day was still gentle.

Listen to the leaves, she said. It’s only spacetime. It’s only 9,192,631,770 periods in the hyperfine transitions of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. One second after another falling to her soil.

There was nothing to worry about after all.