Look Now

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.

 

 

Just now

Ash tree outside window

 

It is one o’clock in the afternoon. I am hungry.  My mind is drifting towards the beans and sourdough bread in the kitchen.  I have been sat still for too long at the £10 IKEA desk. One of the cheap metal wire drawers is collapsed. I should fix it but each time I do, it surrenders to the greater forces of gravity and the weight of paper.  The seat is an unwanted office chair.  A memory comes of my partner smiling as he wheeled the purple and yellow ergonomasaurus across four lanes of traffic at Waterloo.  I sat in the car under rumbling railway arches laughing at him.

A dull pain nags me in the back of my shoulder.  The voices of two bin men drift through the open window as they wheel away used cotton buds, squeezed teabags and stale bread crusts.  The sun is shining. Children are screaming and shouting from a nearby school playground.  The jets of a Boeing 747 are roaring less than one mile above my head.  A wood pigeon is cooing from the top of a sycamore tree in the garden.  Four crows are cawing and doing acrobatics between the branches of an ash tree.  A marble white butterfly flutters up the window.  The school bell rings.

No analysis.  No judgement.  Just now.