It is the fifth instance of the third month of the year two thousand and nineteen, or so they say. Measures of time bemuse me. Sometimes it feels like I am living in many times simultaneously as my roguish mind is wont to wander. It ruminates upon tannin-rich memories, swilling them around my head, clouding my days with powdery sediment. The past is too real, it intrudes upon my present too frequently, too vividly. My body lives through it, over and over again.
Plain sight eludes me. I search feverishly through a tangle of words spoken and deeds done long ago, for safe passage through the unknown. Although, on occasion, I hear the faint voice of a found woman. She calls to me everyday but the noise, the before and the to come, pound on the side of my skull till I cannot hear her any longer. But, today, she emerges from a dusty blackness. A solid, whole being of curved flesh, peppered hair and weathered face sits before me. Her back is straight. She opens her hands and holds my cold fingers in her warm, rough skin and her firmness, her truth cradles my entire being. She fixes me with her level gaze that sees the essence of me and she says: ‘Don’t look back. Don’t look forward. Look now. I dare you.’
And she is gone.
Yasmin Ward 