dream deep

Today I tried to freeze time. It seemed like the best thing to do. Standing still is just frustrating and running makes you tired because you keep stopping up at the wrong time, so this seemed to be the best compromise. What I was trying for was the gap between the sun and the storm, when everything is grey and the sky is perfect and the sun is behind the clouds but it’s not raining yet. You feel the thunder and the electricity in the air, the temperature drop, the way your muscles tighten just that little more in adrenaline and rush. Humbler opinions than mine have agreed that sky is the perfect one: perhaps just a little more even than the blue sky of conventionality. Blast this weather: it hurts my eyes and burns me white and livid and yellow, like golden pitch or tar. I never could get it, the stop I wanted. Was never good with fiddly bits and adding up and subtracting things: two to the power of so-and-so and the sine of what-and-how. I bargained my way: she’d stop for me and I would do as I pleased and in return I must give myself up to her unasked. 

Time folded in on herself, she sat and held me within her, and I was free to do as I liked. I walked through the streets behind my house past freestanding cars and people in half-motion, with vulnerable faces and dead, yellow eyes. No matter, the wind still blew, the sky was still the sky. I drew and drew and drew, all the places I passed by: the whole length of the monsoon drains and the row of trees with the pretty red leaves, the winding streets with all the paused cars, short and stubbed. I drew the crates by the road, thinking to store them up for myself one day. I filled a hundred thousand pages with ink and the pieces of the soul that must go into anything you make or paint or draw or dance, and I was happy. I must have aged a hundred years that afternoon, the afternoon that lasted a hundred years. It was mine, I possessed it completely, there was never anything that was so completely for me, through me, in me. More than mere subordination or religion or art, I possessed it. It was a glorious thing.

But Time, she tricked me, it seems. Even endlessness must come to pass, and Time unfolded herself out of me and went on as usual, silent as a scream. I never even noticed her leave. She took my drawings, the bits of myself that were scrapbooked into physicality with ink, desperate and beautiful and precious. And then there I stood in the rain I’d given up a hundred years to delay, still the same, with only the memory of a hundred thousand drawings that were the best part of me. They fade and fade through memory, and soon it will be like I never drew at all.