You know those big clocks they have in institutions - schools, hospitals? You know how they go when the batteries are almost dead? The second hand keeps flicking forward and dropping back. It counts the seconds, but the hands don't turn. It can fool you - you look up and think "Oh, it's 9.30" or ten past two, or whatever, and then when you look back half an hour later it's still 9.30, or ten past two, or whatever.
Time in waiting rooms is like that. It ticks by, but somehow it doesn't move. It becomes liquid - pooling, eddying, slipping between your fingers.
Waiting rooms are liminal spaces. You sit there, suspended between health and sickness, barrenness and pregnancy, hope and fear. Everything is different. Footsteps resonate. Conversations happen in lurching whispers. Your heartbeat might be the fiercest thing in the universe. You hold your most private fears in your lap in a relentlessly public space. Out there in the real world you have multiple roles. in here you only have one.
The last consultant I had used to have ridiculously overbooked clinics. It must have been hard for him: there's a limit to how quickly you can see a patient, listen to them, examine them, and then work out a plan with them. Once you got in there you were never rushed, he gave you all the time you needed. You just had to wait for it.
We expected to wait a couple of hours. We took books and people-watched. We kept our conversation light and meaningless. What is there to say, anyway? I love you. I'm scared. How long have we got in the carpark? Do we need to get milk on the way home? I love you. I'm scared.
Sarah - I feel more with each contribution from you that I am reading a book in progress... in that I am wanting to spend more time in your sensibility/language/experience and feel that these are indeed becoming parts of a larger whole? I hope so. Here is your link, with thanks and respect as ever. Tx
Sarah, I read your post in the craft question section and I was thinking as I read more of your work, does it need to be a continuous narrative? You have these amazing, powerful vignettes, the detailing here when you go back and forth in the waiting room from fear, to milk, to love, to the meaningless, the stuck clock, it sent me back to every time I've been in a waiting room. I think you could do a whole book of those which seems fitting since this is often how life, especially chronic illness is, these moments that jump out at us, concise and powerful.
Brilliant interpretation of the hell of doctor's waiting rooms, Sarah. The vulnerabilities and the strength. You take me right inside. And I love the ending.
So, so very late to the game...mind and body are just having a rough bit of it so stringing words and together is possible for only the briefest of moments. Still a work in progress this piece, but as always, your words Tanya beget others.
My dear Amy. That these pieces come through from you sometimes weeks after the excerpts are first posted only makes me more glad to have them, knowing so well the effort that goes into writing while living with chronic illness. Each contribution is precious. Here is your link. Tx
It had been a long day. A warm, calm, bright day. A fine summer day of reading old maps and retracing steps. Along the rocks by the coast, up muddy cliffs and on across fields looking for the paths that our ancestors would have followed. I watched the sun set over the Blackwater from an ancient graveyard above a nineteenth century ferry point, now a stony shore sprinkled with cornflowers and daisies.
That night I fell asleep easily with the gentle chatter of sheep and swish of the tide carrying through my open window. When I woke for a 3am pee, rather than taking off my eye mask I decided to allow the wall to guide me to the bathroom. All so familiar after many years.
How life changes in a second. My body hit the ground with a force of about 32kmph. I discovered afterwards the fall of 12 feet would have taken would have taken about 0.8 seconds.
I woke seated at the bottom of the steep stairs to see my foot partially severed from my leg. Alone in a remote cottage, I recognised instinctively that survival was in my hands. Reaching down I placed a hand on either side of my broken limb and slowly pushed my ankle back together again. Then I bound it tightly with cotton leggings, fortuitously hanging on the baluster, and crawled back upstairs to find my phone and call 999.
Time stretched out once more in the minutes, days and weeks that followed. Waiting for emergency services as the swish of the sea drifted through the open door, or for surgery in a ward of waiting women sharing stories from within our medicated fogs, or listening to children’s laughter through the window as, on my heavily plastered leg a kitty lay languid, purrrrrring.
Sheila - the shock & the physicality of this, and all in that accelerating second. Wow. Here is your link, with thanks as ever for your contributions to this undertaking. Tx
Thank you Tanya, it's such an interesting project to contribute to, on many levels. I love your writing, and the approach you take to each subject you address. It's very inspiring. All best wishes, xs
Thanks Sarah. Yes, in hindsight it wasn't pretty. But, you know I tend to think most women would react similarly. Instinctively. The kind of action in this story is one that very often belongs to a male narrative but it seems to me that the desire to survive is embedded in women and a somewhat unarticulated thread through women's history. Such a great subject tho, time!
Oh my what an experience Shelia! It is just the sort of thing that I would do too, using my senses to guide me. I always prefer to sense my way in the dark rather than turn on lights however after reading this, I may opt for a little light at least! The .8 seconds would have felt...well... surreal I imagine! Your presence of mind is admirable!
For several minutes I walked without taking my eyes off the stars as if I was Michelangelo gazing up at the Sistine Chapel, but I started to feel a little dizzy and removed from myself just as he might have done with his "brain crushed in a casket" as he described it. I wondered what he would think of these strange and frightening times, his beloved Italy tortured by a virus, just as he had poetically lamented he was by his art. I steadied myself and set my eyes on the road ahead, reassured that the planets and stars were on their courses, untroubled by earthly concerns. The last gasp of the Crow Moon shimmered behind the swaying tresses of a greening willow. A few days earlier I'd learned that one of these brittle-cold, late March mornings in the dark before dawn when I was up for the early shift, I might be able to make out the conjunction of Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn. Tomorrow, the first full day of national lockdown, Venus would have reached its highest point of the entire year and the first sliver of the Pink Moon would appear to be joining the trio of planets in their cosmic dance. I suddenly had a memory of Mum noticing some new-minted moon and reaching for her purse on her way to the back door to 'turn her money over', just as her father had done, she told me, as if it was possible to magic more from what little he had. It was the first time I'd heard the word 'superstition' and the last I saw of a threepenny bit when it was still legal tender.
Claire, thank you so much for joining us as a writer here, and with this finely-drawn and suprising piece. I love how you take us from the Sistine Chapel to the backdoor of your childhood home and a penny from your mother’s purse. A beautiful sort of vertigo of time and space got from reading it. I do hope you will write for other themes in the project, and find like-minded souls among other contributors here. Here is your link:
Tanya, it was such a wonderful surprise to find your much-appreciated feedback after a very full work week! I'm honoured to be welcomed into this community. I can't believe I only just discovered your book, which I'm now devouring. Thank you so much! I am excited to explore and share.
I've been writing all my life but have only just started to think about sharing anything other than poetry with a wider audience. I love your perspective on my piece! xx
I am here by my bookcase of thick cherry planks, one shelf devoted to books telling me how not to suffer, read, forgotten. Reading a Jack Gilbert poem, ‘Highlights and Interstices.’ He writes, “Our lives happen between the memorable.” My husband, losing his hearing from being surrounded by woodworking equipment, plugging his ears and using his elbow to push down the lid on the coffee grinder and I laughed with him this morning. We are here, in our time between the memorable.
I write about all of the mud here: mud of chicken tracks, mud that turns worms into cartographers, mud that holds the broken hearts of deer hooves, of human-like raccoon prints, mud that my dog tracks in, leaving perfect pawprints on the wood floor, perhaps like Suda the Painting Elephant but in more of a Rorschach kind of way. Perhaps I mop away my chance at fortune. Mud like us, then dust.
Sheila, I am so so glad you've begun writing for our community in these last few months. You have such a distinct voice and sensibility. Your sentences always take me by surprise, I mean. Please please keep responding to themes! Here is your link to this one in the story archive...
Thank you so much! Usually it is only my friends who see my writing and I get good responses from them, but I always have the thought that they know me so well that it is easier for them to enjoy my writing, to hear my voice. You have been so encouraging and your book has been such a life changer, the parallels in our lives are many, so many dog eared pages. This means so much!
We decided, my friend and I to drive from LA to Vegas. Only she wasn’t so good at driving. Chatting and laughing we hit a pothole on the desert road and our car flipped over, and over.
Shards of windscreen glass headed for us as we flew through the air, turning.
This is it, I thought. I am going to die.
I felt light.
Time slowed. Right down. It almost stopped.
I put my hands up to my face. Got ready for the glass, or for the end.
But the car stopped.
I opened my eyes, moved my hands. My body was there.
I couldn’t believe it.
I turned to my friend.
I could see the white of her brain.
A man came to my window to help me out. Worried the car would catch fire I let him help me.
Sitting at the side of the road, a man leant down as a helicopter landed and asked if my friend had insurance.
Inside a desert hospital a man sits before me, nervous, hands shaking. He’s going to stitch up my arm and today is his first day on the job. Oh so what was your last job? I asked. Tracking satellites, he said.
Checking the scar now I smile because he was kind. I can picture his big hands and my young girl’s arm in it, so far away from home.
I’m shaking with shock. A warm blanket is wrapped around me. The warmth feels incredible and my body calms. I listen as a doctor stitches my friend’s head. They’re both from Nigeria. Tell me your name, he asks, to keep her conscious. She tells him. Oh, like our president! He jokes. Yes, my Dad, she replies. Did time slow for him in that moment to? Once I told him, yes, its true.
Molly! You're already a much-published author, so I knew you could write, but still this is exciting to receive: such perfect story-telling of that strange experience (which I've survived too) of seeing the windscreen go in slow motion, having all that time in an instant... and then the surprise of that ending.
Do you know Paul Auster's anthology True Tales of American Life? It is precious to me, and played a strange role in how I years after reading it came to publish my own first piece of work (a local project based on it inspired me to write and submit for the first time). It is so full of stories of love, loss, comedy, mystery, family and more - all true, and gathered from people across america who listened to his NPR radio show. If you don't know it I think you'll love it.
I so hope you write more for my project, and that we can meet again one season soon. It was very special to meet you at Chip Lit, and to know you'd listened to my book as you drove. Thank you.
"Here lies John Dickinson. Prematurely mown down by Death's inexorable scythe, aged 87."
Wandering around the church, cool refuge from the August heat, Pete was all architect, stone carving and wonder: I was all names, and lives and language.
And John; he had twinkling blue eyes, and skin leather-brown from years working the land, ploughing the furrow. Mischievous, kindly, warm-hearted, seemingly ageless.
'Ah John, now there's a man. Loved life, he did. Sun and rain were alike to him. Could name every bird and mimic their calls. Knew the soil like his own body. Never left the village, they said, but contentment ran through his veins like blood. Always a smile.'
And that day I knew him, his cottage, his Martha. I recognised him with his jug of ale sat against the sun-soaked wall at the end of the day. I saw his eyes light up as she sat beside him. 'Might as well take a minute.' 'Might as well lass.'
He would have lived beyond a hundred. Everyone agreed on that. But no one knows the hour, the time. Everyone agreed on that too.
Oh Jean - how beautiful this is. I'm rereading some of Lawrence at the moment, and you have conjured a person very like Tom Brangwen here for me. As with your piece for Birds of Firle, I love how you can take me to a very specific place & time so deftly. Thank you. Your link below... Tan xx
Throughout my life, I have fallen prey to the ‘witching hour’, that bottomless pocket of time in the middle of the night. It must be a man who came up with the name, because witching is the very essence of wild feminine power, not a recipe for nightmares. Sometimes I become a sea witch, weaving spells in the waves, screeching and spinning in the surf. Witches are girls who rebel and dare to be different, women who refuse to conform, who challenge with their eyes.
But the so-called witching hour still haunts me and is drenched in negative connotations of peril and fear. It rarely lasts for an hour, I know that from the blue glare of my phone. Time stretches, drapes me in its heavy cloak so that I am pinned to sheets that wrinkle and shift under my body. The squeak of a child turning in bed becomes a rat in the drawer of my bedside table. Night breeze knocking the blind against a vase is a stranger’s whisper. The cat jumping onto the kitchen floor is a man at the bottom of the stairs waiting to steal my breath for good.
There is little I can do to break the spell - it is a trick of darkness. Soaked in the night, I try to pour myself into a book, lose myself in someone else for a while. If the sky is clear, I can step out of my bedroom, heart bumping hard because of the man at the bottom of the stairs, and tiptoe onto the landing. If I am lucky there will be a moon, and this means I can breathe once more. The moon rejects the witching hour and spins magic in the tides, where the real witching takes place. I can bask in the glow splintered by my dusty window and wait for time to catch me up once more.
Caro, thank you so much for this. Such atmosphere in so few words, and the exciting sense of seeing what may be part of larger whole from your work in progress? Huge and warm congratulations once again on your win in the BBC writing competition, and my thanks for your part in this much more modest project! Here is your link... Tan x
They are framed now in my memory, sectioned off, those last, precious, exhausting days at your bedside: you in that liminal space between life and death, me watching your chest rise and fall, listening for clues in your breath. Full, stretched-out days under a bright overhead light. Days punctuated by those who checked you and made decisions on your behalf. Days marked by each anxious hour, not knowing how many more there would be. Anxious, but peaceful. There was acceptance too.
We tried reading you the poems you had loved in your cognisant years: Browning, Manley Hopkins, maybe even some Edward Lear – I can’t remember now. But it felt awkward speaking out loud, self-conscious somehow. And the words seemed meaningless, belonging to a world that you were leaving behind. The prayers felt like spells, whispered over you with best intentions by nuns who treated us softly and had been here many times before. I no longer had faith. Not like you. But these were welcomed rituals. Their rhythm was calming and felt familiar.
And then such long, quiet nights of vigil, when the footsteps in the corridors stopped, the nuns disappeared and the lights were dimmed to a dismal yellow glow. It felt impossible that you would last the night, and then the next and the next. I no longer knew what I wished for. But there was always relief when curtains were opened, the light undimmed and the footsteps returned to the corridors. At least one more morning. I remember a magpie in the garden. Just one. Poignant. I remember a bare, winter tree. I remember thinking: “I must remember these things. I must remember everything.” And I do still remember. Most things. They are framed.
Oh Joanna. This is a tender- and finely-boned piece. ‘Your cognisant years’ - what a beautiful and concentrated way of saying (goodbye to) so much. And what you say about the strangeness of reading aloud - I thought I’d do more of it too at my mother’s bedside, and didn’t. And then the poignancy of ‘I no longer knew what I wished for.’ I still can’t put into writing those last days of my mother but - as good writing like yours does for us - your piece speaks for my experience as well as your own. Thank you for sharing it. Here is your link:
Looking at the ornaments on my Christmas tree, that I’ve been collecting for twenty years now, I’m struck this year, about how many of them convey a sense of travelling.
A winged angel, a bird, a pair of red Santa boots, a train, a unicorn and a white-clad fairy on a sled. All unashamedly old-fashioned in their sense of Christmas. The more otherworldly, the better.
And so it was with childhood Christmases. Christmas Day was one of only two days of the year, that the family would be “off-duty” from the pub I grew up in. Even then, we opened for two hours between noon and 2pm for our friends and regulars and especially for those who probably didn’t have anywhere else to go on Christmas Day.
Nowhere to go, in a small, rural, edge-of-the-Atlantic town, with no businesses open and no internet, seems like another world. No visiting if you didn’t have a car, or friends to come to your house.
I adored Christmas a child and it still occupies a particular place in my heart. It is about the birth of Jesus, sure. But it’s also a midwinter festival of light, a time to hibernate and dream, a time of openings – the portal to this magical midwinter world, a new year ahead and closings – the old year.
My Christmas decorations, have been little anchors, for many years now. Seeing me through all my London moves. Even if the place I was living in, was not terribly lovely – many of them weren’t – my Christmas tree decorations were points of joy and pride, a way to connect to myself and my childhood, while honouring a season that generally means a lot to Irish people. I even bought tree lights that were the same as the ones we had on the tree at home in childhood.
Barbara… how good to find this from you on what is now (of necessity) my once-a-week day with this project. I think you must be the Barbara I enjoyed that good phone conversation with, as the place you describe here, and the quality of the prose, both feel like yours. I wonder if I’m right? It will be such a pleasure to add this story to the collection, and to have the prospect of other pieces by you ahead of me. Before I can curate it onto the book site though, I’d need you to reply here with a last name (can be pseudonymous) or an initial please - with so many contributors now a lot of first names are beginning to duplicate… But that’s the admin side of this project… the soul side is receiving first pieces through from people whose writing I already know a little and admire. Txxx
We weren’t twins, but people could be forgiven for making that assumption. Just a year and two frosty months between us, adorned in the same garish 90’s t’shirts, pigtails bouncing on the same days, and matching beige sandals (dubbed ‘The Jesus ones’) in our end of school photo.
Legs intertwined in the cramped bath, money was sparse and mums energy even more so.
As I sit in my own cramped bath now, no legs to intertwine with-just the grown bulk of me immersed in the suds, I fill an empty shampoo bottle and start to play.
I hold the bottle deep in the water and wait for the belching bubble to rupture the calm surface of white, silky swathes. This is when I know the bottle is brimmed-it wont hold any more.
I pour the hot, soapy liquid of the first bottle over my shoulders, a waterfall massage that loosens the muscles. I go on, refilling and emptying the bottle over different parts of me. I lift my feet and place them on the sides of the bath, start to cascade the water over the supple skin of my thighs.
As I start to fill the bottle to pour over my hair, a memory emerges. It comes in my chest, a fiery ball. I close my eyes and start to pour the water over my tilted head. As the water soaks in, I imagine its yours.
I am seven again, and you are eight.
The bathroom door is closed and we are safe inside the humidity of our bath time.
We sit facing each other, piling soap foam on our heads, aiming to get the pointiest peak, before mum comes in with the outstretched towel.
Our cheeks are rosy with heat and excitement, skin clammy and cleansed from too much soap, and neither of us wants to get out to dry off.
You get out first, walk into the wall of towel, before she wraps you tightly and kisses your cheek.
If only I could have filled the bottle with you as you were in that bath, before the self inflicted punctures on supple thighs, before we grew too far apart that you would assume we were strangers, let alone twins.
I would have put a lid on that bottle and poured you out now, soft skinned, naive, and my sister.
I pull the plug not long after, knowing this bath can’t hold any more.
Lauren - this is the second of your pieces I've had the pleasure and privilege to read today. How glad I am you've joined the project. My own two children are close in age like this, and were often assumed to be twins. They bathed together every night til my son was seven, my daughter five. Then it naturally ended. In the summer holidays of that year I said they should put their swimsuits on (they'd become aware of their nakedness in a new way) for One Last Shared Bath. I handed them each a whole bottle of bubble bath and a kitchen whisk with the instruction to whip foam as high above the bath top as they could without it spilling over. I'd forgotten all the sensory rituals of those years, but your writing here - like all good writing about one's very particular memories - has taken me time-travelling in turn. Thank you.
How sharply sad the almost-ending of your piece - but then the love offering of your beautifully elegiac penultimate sentence.
Lauren! Welcome to the project. I will be reading all the new submissions that have come in over the bank holiday tomorrow and beginning to reply properly then. But given you're new to the project, I wanted to pop onto here quickly to say thank you. I will be back here in comments in the next few days once I've read your pieces to respond fully.
(Could you check your send settings please? I'm receiving multiple emails & notifications for each of the stories you're submitting which hasn't happened before in the few years I've been running this and receiving submissions. I get a notification each time a new comment is posted, and within a week always respond to any new story posts - although I can't of course keep track of every new comment community members make when reading and responding to eachother's contributions as they are SO many wonderful ones happening day and night on here!).
Mar 26, 2023·edited Mar 26, 2023Liked by Tanya Shadrick
When it was time for patients to go home to say their goodbyes, we had the honour of taking them.
We would share the care, my partner and I, either driving, or sitting with the patient. More often than not, I was blessed to be able to sit and be the company the patient almost always sought. Heart, mind, and ears open, with an ability to offer hugs without as much as a touch, was often all they required.
For many, this time spent in the enclosed space was akin to time in a confession box, and in the perceived suspension of time, sins a plenty would be discharged in the air, hanging for a while before dissolving.
Sometimes words would tumble out, rushing like the sea to the shore, releasing more with each wave. Other times words failed, so we sat in silence until time dislodged the minds' hold, and then an avalanche would ensue.
Regrets laid heavy on hearts that were now too frail to hold them. So many words were left unsaid for reasons now forgotten, about things that had long since lost their once-perceived importance.
Time was the scapegoat for almost everything, one way or another, and, most especially for all that remained on the imaginary bucket lists that hung in the recesses of best intentions.
Time was also the saviour, the gift that so many felt allowed them space to say what had always been left unsaid.
Many concluded that love mattered most when all was said and done. Old and young, bitter or resigned, it did not matter; there did not appear to be a pattern other than this universal conclusion.
I have since carried the wisdom of their words in my heart; for I have seen that time is indeed a gift and love really is all that matters.
What a role to have played in so many lives at their ending, Tracey. I love the way you have conveyed the almost geological nature of how personalities shift and their energies change towards the end. Yes, I recognise this from own experience working with those at end of life. Thank you as ever for how you are contributing to this project. Here is your link:
Thank you Tanya. I am as ever so very grateful for this opportunity to write in this space. Without it I don't know that I would have shared my words, my memories to the outside world.
...but now you have begun, I forsee your writing journey moving out from here into many other places (while also hoping my themes will hold your interest so that you stay with us too!) xx
Oh yes for sure Tanya, I want to keep going on my writing journey! I feel that I have changed already. I am now feeling into everything with words rather than wondering how I might capture with a paintbrush. So exciting! xx
Thank you Tracey. Someday I hope to go back to the darkness at night, but for now I always have a chink of light somewhere. The restfulness that darkness offers is beautiful though! Sheila
This is so beautiful... such loving, gentle dialogue. I feel I've got a glimpse here of your writing beyond this project - even if based on true events, this feels like part of a short story or novel...
I can't add this to the curate archive over on the book site, only because you are not present within the action of the story - this is (along with word-length, and some other key criteria) one of my submission criteria for tales that can be included.
Do take a look at these before your next piece, as I remain eager to include more work by you:
I hope you will use this piece in your own substack or consider finding a place to submit it for publication (if you haven't though of this already that is!)
Jun 11, 2023·edited Jun 11, 2023Liked by Tanya Shadrick
Tanya, I’m so sorry. I keep making work for you. :( I shall delete the first comment in the thread and hope it deletes all this so no one else sees what I’ve done and gets the same idea. Sorry again. M.
Please don’t delete - it’s a beautiful piece of writing & I have no concerns about it confusing others. I only need to hold to my project criteria so I can ensure a clear process for everyone (it also limits risk to me & these writing as writing about others is a tricky endeavour…).
I also need to remind the whole community of the submission criteria as now more people are joining they don’t always know how the project came about & for what - not should they. It’s on me to do updates now we’re in year three!
Keep writing here! But also be sending work to other places based on this. You’ve got a strong & good voice…
Oh, Tanya. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again! Thank you again for your kind words, gentle reminders, and unwavering generosity. I’ll post it again below (as well as on my own little corner of Substack!). M.
- - - - -
Soul-tying
She called him to her.
“Genevieve.” A pause, seconds short, lifetimes long. “Ginny?”
She opened her eyes. Once a beautiful hazel now rheumy and opaque.
“You came.”
“Of course.”
“Sit with me.”
He sat. Listened to her laboured breathing, the breaths becoming shallower and easier with each one passing.
“Kiss me.”
He did.
His white bristles caused the old electricity to jump between them.
Ginny felt her soul leave her body. Instead of heading up, up into the everlasting May morning she knew awaited her, it skipped into a new (old, familiar) vessel.
That night, curtains wide, welcoming the stars and moon she’d loved so, he visited the jewelled memories, turning them over and over, feeling their weight, the sun’s warmth, before returning each to its well-worn place.
He’d truly loved her. She’d never voiced her feelings. A lifetime passed, and now he’d never know.
He felt a great joy swell in his chest. Poker-hot at first, it settled into something warm, cat-like. Heavy and reassuring as he lay in waxing moonlight.
A smile spread across his face as he relived the kiss. After they’d caught their breath they’d agreed it was time-stopping, soul-tying.
The cat on his chest purred, sensed the shift from reverie to sleep. She fed him sweet dreams of oaken kisses and summer rain-filled lanes.
He woke, felt the warm spot on his chest where until recently a comforting cat had been curled, waiting, and a sudden conviction took him.
Motorway hours, A-road minutes, lane seconds later he walked the route so beloved to them that short gift of a summer.
He sat under their oak, back against the sun-warmed bark. No rain today.
He thought of the kiss again and felt her soul slip away into the new, bright leaves. Thought he heard her laugh.
You know those big clocks they have in institutions - schools, hospitals? You know how they go when the batteries are almost dead? The second hand keeps flicking forward and dropping back. It counts the seconds, but the hands don't turn. It can fool you - you look up and think "Oh, it's 9.30" or ten past two, or whatever, and then when you look back half an hour later it's still 9.30, or ten past two, or whatever.
Time in waiting rooms is like that. It ticks by, but somehow it doesn't move. It becomes liquid - pooling, eddying, slipping between your fingers.
Waiting rooms are liminal spaces. You sit there, suspended between health and sickness, barrenness and pregnancy, hope and fear. Everything is different. Footsteps resonate. Conversations happen in lurching whispers. Your heartbeat might be the fiercest thing in the universe. You hold your most private fears in your lap in a relentlessly public space. Out there in the real world you have multiple roles. in here you only have one.
The last consultant I had used to have ridiculously overbooked clinics. It must have been hard for him: there's a limit to how quickly you can see a patient, listen to them, examine them, and then work out a plan with them. Once you got in there you were never rushed, he gave you all the time you needed. You just had to wait for it.
We expected to wait a couple of hours. We took books and people-watched. We kept our conversation light and meaningless. What is there to say, anyway? I love you. I'm scared. How long have we got in the carpark? Do we need to get milk on the way home? I love you. I'm scared.
Sarah - I feel more with each contribution from you that I am reading a book in progress... in that I am wanting to spend more time in your sensibility/language/experience and feel that these are indeed becoming parts of a larger whole? I hope so. Here is your link, with thanks and respect as ever. Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#sarahconnor
Sarah, I read your post in the craft question section and I was thinking as I read more of your work, does it need to be a continuous narrative? You have these amazing, powerful vignettes, the detailing here when you go back and forth in the waiting room from fear, to milk, to love, to the meaningless, the stuck clock, it sent me back to every time I've been in a waiting room. I think you could do a whole book of those which seems fitting since this is often how life, especially chronic illness is, these moments that jump out at us, concise and powerful.
Brilliant interpretation of the hell of doctor's waiting rooms, Sarah. The vulnerabilities and the strength. You take me right inside. And I love the ending.
So, so very late to the game...mind and body are just having a rough bit of it so stringing words and together is possible for only the briefest of moments. Still a work in progress this piece, but as always, your words Tanya beget others.
****************************
August 2021
mess
clutter
dust
hearts on wall
in a frame and
hanging from strings
raindrops like lace on screen
fern under glass
cat sniffs air
eyelids close
eyelids open
light pierces left eye
shoulders sink
so..heavy.
h e a v y.
h e a v y.
single words
fragments
half thoughts and no end
in this room
with shades down
beneath blanket
breathing—
in
out.
nine years so far
of breathing
and watching
others move on:
chronic illness is
hard time
My dear Amy. That these pieces come through from you sometimes weeks after the excerpts are first posted only makes me more glad to have them, knowing so well the effort that goes into writing while living with chronic illness. Each contribution is precious. Here is your link. Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#amymillios
So moving!
Thank you x
Thank you, Tracey! x
From Sheila de Courcy
It had been a long day. A warm, calm, bright day. A fine summer day of reading old maps and retracing steps. Along the rocks by the coast, up muddy cliffs and on across fields looking for the paths that our ancestors would have followed. I watched the sun set over the Blackwater from an ancient graveyard above a nineteenth century ferry point, now a stony shore sprinkled with cornflowers and daisies.
That night I fell asleep easily with the gentle chatter of sheep and swish of the tide carrying through my open window. When I woke for a 3am pee, rather than taking off my eye mask I decided to allow the wall to guide me to the bathroom. All so familiar after many years.
How life changes in a second. My body hit the ground with a force of about 32kmph. I discovered afterwards the fall of 12 feet would have taken would have taken about 0.8 seconds.
I woke seated at the bottom of the steep stairs to see my foot partially severed from my leg. Alone in a remote cottage, I recognised instinctively that survival was in my hands. Reaching down I placed a hand on either side of my broken limb and slowly pushed my ankle back together again. Then I bound it tightly with cotton leggings, fortuitously hanging on the baluster, and crawled back upstairs to find my phone and call 999.
Time stretched out once more in the minutes, days and weeks that followed. Waiting for emergency services as the swish of the sea drifted through the open door, or for surgery in a ward of waiting women sharing stories from within our medicated fogs, or listening to children’s laughter through the window as, on my heavily plastered leg a kitty lay languid, purrrrrring.
Sheila - the shock & the physicality of this, and all in that accelerating second. Wow. Here is your link, with thanks as ever for your contributions to this undertaking. Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#sheiladecourcy
Thank you Tanya, it's such an interesting project to contribute to, on many levels. I love your writing, and the approach you take to each subject you address. It's very inspiring. All best wishes, xs
Holy crap! That must have been terrifying. What presence of mind you had!
Thanks Sarah. Yes, in hindsight it wasn't pretty. But, you know I tend to think most women would react similarly. Instinctively. The kind of action in this story is one that very often belongs to a male narrative but it seems to me that the desire to survive is embedded in women and a somewhat unarticulated thread through women's history. Such a great subject tho, time!
Oh my what an experience Shelia! It is just the sort of thing that I would do too, using my senses to guide me. I always prefer to sense my way in the dark rather than turn on lights however after reading this, I may opt for a little light at least! The .8 seconds would have felt...well... surreal I imagine! Your presence of mind is admirable!
Thank you for sharing.
Tracey x
For several minutes I walked without taking my eyes off the stars as if I was Michelangelo gazing up at the Sistine Chapel, but I started to feel a little dizzy and removed from myself just as he might have done with his "brain crushed in a casket" as he described it. I wondered what he would think of these strange and frightening times, his beloved Italy tortured by a virus, just as he had poetically lamented he was by his art. I steadied myself and set my eyes on the road ahead, reassured that the planets and stars were on their courses, untroubled by earthly concerns. The last gasp of the Crow Moon shimmered behind the swaying tresses of a greening willow. A few days earlier I'd learned that one of these brittle-cold, late March mornings in the dark before dawn when I was up for the early shift, I might be able to make out the conjunction of Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn. Tomorrow, the first full day of national lockdown, Venus would have reached its highest point of the entire year and the first sliver of the Pink Moon would appear to be joining the trio of planets in their cosmic dance. I suddenly had a memory of Mum noticing some new-minted moon and reaching for her purse on her way to the back door to 'turn her money over', just as her father had done, she told me, as if it was possible to magic more from what little he had. It was the first time I'd heard the word 'superstition' and the last I saw of a threepenny bit when it was still legal tender.
Claire, thank you so much for joining us as a writer here, and with this finely-drawn and suprising piece. I love how you take us from the Sistine Chapel to the backdoor of your childhood home and a penny from your mother’s purse. A beautiful sort of vertigo of time and space got from reading it. I do hope you will write for other themes in the project, and find like-minded souls among other contributors here. Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#claireeverett
Tanya xx
Tanya, it was such a wonderful surprise to find your much-appreciated feedback after a very full work week! I'm honoured to be welcomed into this community. I can't believe I only just discovered your book, which I'm now devouring. Thank you so much! I am excited to explore and share.
I've been writing all my life but have only just started to think about sharing anything other than poetry with a wider audience. I love your perspective on my piece! xx
It’s lovely to have you join me/us here. Look forward to reading more! xx
I am here by my bookcase of thick cherry planks, one shelf devoted to books telling me how not to suffer, read, forgotten. Reading a Jack Gilbert poem, ‘Highlights and Interstices.’ He writes, “Our lives happen between the memorable.” My husband, losing his hearing from being surrounded by woodworking equipment, plugging his ears and using his elbow to push down the lid on the coffee grinder and I laughed with him this morning. We are here, in our time between the memorable.
I write about all of the mud here: mud of chicken tracks, mud that turns worms into cartographers, mud that holds the broken hearts of deer hooves, of human-like raccoon prints, mud that my dog tracks in, leaving perfect pawprints on the wood floor, perhaps like Suda the Painting Elephant but in more of a Rorschach kind of way. Perhaps I mop away my chance at fortune. Mud like us, then dust.
Sheila, I am so so glad you've begun writing for our community in these last few months. You have such a distinct voice and sensibility. Your sentences always take me by surprise, I mean. Please please keep responding to themes! Here is your link to this one in the story archive...
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#sheilaknell
Tanya xx
Thank you so much! Usually it is only my friends who see my writing and I get good responses from them, but I always have the thought that they know me so well that it is easier for them to enjoy my writing, to hear my voice. You have been so encouraging and your book has been such a life changer, the parallels in our lives are many, so many dog eared pages. This means so much!
We decided, my friend and I to drive from LA to Vegas. Only she wasn’t so good at driving. Chatting and laughing we hit a pothole on the desert road and our car flipped over, and over.
Shards of windscreen glass headed for us as we flew through the air, turning.
This is it, I thought. I am going to die.
I felt light.
Time slowed. Right down. It almost stopped.
I put my hands up to my face. Got ready for the glass, or for the end.
But the car stopped.
I opened my eyes, moved my hands. My body was there.
I couldn’t believe it.
I turned to my friend.
I could see the white of her brain.
A man came to my window to help me out. Worried the car would catch fire I let him help me.
Sitting at the side of the road, a man leant down as a helicopter landed and asked if my friend had insurance.
Inside a desert hospital a man sits before me, nervous, hands shaking. He’s going to stitch up my arm and today is his first day on the job. Oh so what was your last job? I asked. Tracking satellites, he said.
Checking the scar now I smile because he was kind. I can picture his big hands and my young girl’s arm in it, so far away from home.
I’m shaking with shock. A warm blanket is wrapped around me. The warmth feels incredible and my body calms. I listen as a doctor stitches my friend’s head. They’re both from Nigeria. Tell me your name, he asks, to keep her conscious. She tells him. Oh, like our president! He jokes. Yes, my Dad, she replies. Did time slow for him in that moment to? Once I told him, yes, its true.
Molly! You're already a much-published author, so I knew you could write, but still this is exciting to receive: such perfect story-telling of that strange experience (which I've survived too) of seeing the windscreen go in slow motion, having all that time in an instant... and then the surprise of that ending.
Do you know Paul Auster's anthology True Tales of American Life? It is precious to me, and played a strange role in how I years after reading it came to publish my own first piece of work (a local project based on it inspired me to write and submit for the first time). It is so full of stories of love, loss, comedy, mystery, family and more - all true, and gathered from people across america who listened to his NPR radio show. If you don't know it I think you'll love it.
I so hope you write more for my project, and that we can meet again one season soon. It was very special to meet you at Chip Lit, and to know you'd listened to my book as you drove. Thank you.
Here is a link to your piece...
Tan xxx
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#mollycooper
"Here lies John Dickinson. Prematurely mown down by Death's inexorable scythe, aged 87."
Wandering around the church, cool refuge from the August heat, Pete was all architect, stone carving and wonder: I was all names, and lives and language.
And John; he had twinkling blue eyes, and skin leather-brown from years working the land, ploughing the furrow. Mischievous, kindly, warm-hearted, seemingly ageless.
'Ah John, now there's a man. Loved life, he did. Sun and rain were alike to him. Could name every bird and mimic their calls. Knew the soil like his own body. Never left the village, they said, but contentment ran through his veins like blood. Always a smile.'
And that day I knew him, his cottage, his Martha. I recognised him with his jug of ale sat against the sun-soaked wall at the end of the day. I saw his eyes light up as she sat beside him. 'Might as well take a minute.' 'Might as well lass.'
He would have lived beyond a hundred. Everyone agreed on that. But no one knows the hour, the time. Everyone agreed on that too.
Oh Jean - how beautiful this is. I'm rereading some of Lawrence at the moment, and you have conjured a person very like Tom Brangwen here for me. As with your piece for Birds of Firle, I love how you can take me to a very specific place & time so deftly. Thank you. Your link below... Tan xx
Thanks so much. Very encouraging. I went to Exmouth every year fromm 11 to 18 and never forgot the graveyard.
Your link! https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#jeanwilson
Oh how very beautiful Jean!
Thank you for sharing
Tracey x
Thanks for reading
Throughout my life, I have fallen prey to the ‘witching hour’, that bottomless pocket of time in the middle of the night. It must be a man who came up with the name, because witching is the very essence of wild feminine power, not a recipe for nightmares. Sometimes I become a sea witch, weaving spells in the waves, screeching and spinning in the surf. Witches are girls who rebel and dare to be different, women who refuse to conform, who challenge with their eyes.
But the so-called witching hour still haunts me and is drenched in negative connotations of peril and fear. It rarely lasts for an hour, I know that from the blue glare of my phone. Time stretches, drapes me in its heavy cloak so that I am pinned to sheets that wrinkle and shift under my body. The squeak of a child turning in bed becomes a rat in the drawer of my bedside table. Night breeze knocking the blind against a vase is a stranger’s whisper. The cat jumping onto the kitchen floor is a man at the bottom of the stairs waiting to steal my breath for good.
There is little I can do to break the spell - it is a trick of darkness. Soaked in the night, I try to pour myself into a book, lose myself in someone else for a while. If the sky is clear, I can step out of my bedroom, heart bumping hard because of the man at the bottom of the stairs, and tiptoe onto the landing. If I am lucky there will be a moon, and this means I can breathe once more. The moon rejects the witching hour and spins magic in the tides, where the real witching takes place. I can bask in the glow splintered by my dusty window and wait for time to catch me up once more.
Caro, thank you so much for this. Such atmosphere in so few words, and the exciting sense of seeing what may be part of larger whole from your work in progress? Huge and warm congratulations once again on your win in the BBC writing competition, and my thanks for your part in this much more modest project! Here is your link... Tan x
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#carofentiman
Days and Nights by Joanna Baker
They are framed now in my memory, sectioned off, those last, precious, exhausting days at your bedside: you in that liminal space between life and death, me watching your chest rise and fall, listening for clues in your breath. Full, stretched-out days under a bright overhead light. Days punctuated by those who checked you and made decisions on your behalf. Days marked by each anxious hour, not knowing how many more there would be. Anxious, but peaceful. There was acceptance too.
We tried reading you the poems you had loved in your cognisant years: Browning, Manley Hopkins, maybe even some Edward Lear – I can’t remember now. But it felt awkward speaking out loud, self-conscious somehow. And the words seemed meaningless, belonging to a world that you were leaving behind. The prayers felt like spells, whispered over you with best intentions by nuns who treated us softly and had been here many times before. I no longer had faith. Not like you. But these were welcomed rituals. Their rhythm was calming and felt familiar.
And then such long, quiet nights of vigil, when the footsteps in the corridors stopped, the nuns disappeared and the lights were dimmed to a dismal yellow glow. It felt impossible that you would last the night, and then the next and the next. I no longer knew what I wished for. But there was always relief when curtains were opened, the light undimmed and the footsteps returned to the corridors. At least one more morning. I remember a magpie in the garden. Just one. Poignant. I remember a bare, winter tree. I remember thinking: “I must remember these things. I must remember everything.” And I do still remember. Most things. They are framed.
Oh Joanna. This is a tender- and finely-boned piece. ‘Your cognisant years’ - what a beautiful and concentrated way of saying (goodbye to) so much. And what you say about the strangeness of reading aloud - I thought I’d do more of it too at my mother’s bedside, and didn’t. And then the poignancy of ‘I no longer knew what I wished for.’ I still can’t put into writing those last days of my mother but - as good writing like yours does for us - your piece speaks for my experience as well as your own. Thank you for sharing it. Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#joannabaker
Txx
Thank you Tanya, that means a lot.
Looking at the ornaments on my Christmas tree, that I’ve been collecting for twenty years now, I’m struck this year, about how many of them convey a sense of travelling.
A winged angel, a bird, a pair of red Santa boots, a train, a unicorn and a white-clad fairy on a sled. All unashamedly old-fashioned in their sense of Christmas. The more otherworldly, the better.
And so it was with childhood Christmases. Christmas Day was one of only two days of the year, that the family would be “off-duty” from the pub I grew up in. Even then, we opened for two hours between noon and 2pm for our friends and regulars and especially for those who probably didn’t have anywhere else to go on Christmas Day.
Nowhere to go, in a small, rural, edge-of-the-Atlantic town, with no businesses open and no internet, seems like another world. No visiting if you didn’t have a car, or friends to come to your house.
I adored Christmas a child and it still occupies a particular place in my heart. It is about the birth of Jesus, sure. But it’s also a midwinter festival of light, a time to hibernate and dream, a time of openings – the portal to this magical midwinter world, a new year ahead and closings – the old year.
My Christmas decorations, have been little anchors, for many years now. Seeing me through all my London moves. Even if the place I was living in, was not terribly lovely – many of them weren’t – my Christmas tree decorations were points of joy and pride, a way to connect to myself and my childhood, while honouring a season that generally means a lot to Irish people. I even bought tree lights that were the same as the ones we had on the tree at home in childhood.
Barbara… how good to find this from you on what is now (of necessity) my once-a-week day with this project. I think you must be the Barbara I enjoyed that good phone conversation with, as the place you describe here, and the quality of the prose, both feel like yours. I wonder if I’m right? It will be such a pleasure to add this story to the collection, and to have the prospect of other pieces by you ahead of me. Before I can curate it onto the book site though, I’d need you to reply here with a last name (can be pseudonymous) or an initial please - with so many contributors now a lot of first names are beginning to duplicate… But that’s the admin side of this project… the soul side is receiving first pieces through from people whose writing I already know a little and admire. Txxx
Thank you very much Tanya. Lovely comments :)
I think this community will help discipline me a bit more :)
We weren’t twins, but people could be forgiven for making that assumption. Just a year and two frosty months between us, adorned in the same garish 90’s t’shirts, pigtails bouncing on the same days, and matching beige sandals (dubbed ‘The Jesus ones’) in our end of school photo.
Legs intertwined in the cramped bath, money was sparse and mums energy even more so.
As I sit in my own cramped bath now, no legs to intertwine with-just the grown bulk of me immersed in the suds, I fill an empty shampoo bottle and start to play.
I hold the bottle deep in the water and wait for the belching bubble to rupture the calm surface of white, silky swathes. This is when I know the bottle is brimmed-it wont hold any more.
I pour the hot, soapy liquid of the first bottle over my shoulders, a waterfall massage that loosens the muscles. I go on, refilling and emptying the bottle over different parts of me. I lift my feet and place them on the sides of the bath, start to cascade the water over the supple skin of my thighs.
As I start to fill the bottle to pour over my hair, a memory emerges. It comes in my chest, a fiery ball. I close my eyes and start to pour the water over my tilted head. As the water soaks in, I imagine its yours.
I am seven again, and you are eight.
The bathroom door is closed and we are safe inside the humidity of our bath time.
We sit facing each other, piling soap foam on our heads, aiming to get the pointiest peak, before mum comes in with the outstretched towel.
Our cheeks are rosy with heat and excitement, skin clammy and cleansed from too much soap, and neither of us wants to get out to dry off.
You get out first, walk into the wall of towel, before she wraps you tightly and kisses your cheek.
If only I could have filled the bottle with you as you were in that bath, before the self inflicted punctures on supple thighs, before we grew too far apart that you would assume we were strangers, let alone twins.
I would have put a lid on that bottle and poured you out now, soft skinned, naive, and my sister.
I pull the plug not long after, knowing this bath can’t hold any more.
Lauren - this is the second of your pieces I've had the pleasure and privilege to read today. How glad I am you've joined the project. My own two children are close in age like this, and were often assumed to be twins. They bathed together every night til my son was seven, my daughter five. Then it naturally ended. In the summer holidays of that year I said they should put their swimsuits on (they'd become aware of their nakedness in a new way) for One Last Shared Bath. I handed them each a whole bottle of bubble bath and a kitchen whisk with the instruction to whip foam as high above the bath top as they could without it spilling over. I'd forgotten all the sensory rituals of those years, but your writing here - like all good writing about one's very particular memories - has taken me time-travelling in turn. Thank you.
How sharply sad the almost-ending of your piece - but then the love offering of your beautifully elegiac penultimate sentence.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#laurenlongshaw
Txx
Lauren! Welcome to the project. I will be reading all the new submissions that have come in over the bank holiday tomorrow and beginning to reply properly then. But given you're new to the project, I wanted to pop onto here quickly to say thank you. I will be back here in comments in the next few days once I've read your pieces to respond fully.
(Could you check your send settings please? I'm receiving multiple emails & notifications for each of the stories you're submitting which hasn't happened before in the few years I've been running this and receiving submissions. I get a notification each time a new comment is posted, and within a week always respond to any new story posts - although I can't of course keep track of every new comment community members make when reading and responding to eachother's contributions as they are SO many wonderful ones happening day and night on here!).
Thanks Tanya.
Will do!
When it was time for patients to go home to say their goodbyes, we had the honour of taking them.
We would share the care, my partner and I, either driving, or sitting with the patient. More often than not, I was blessed to be able to sit and be the company the patient almost always sought. Heart, mind, and ears open, with an ability to offer hugs without as much as a touch, was often all they required.
For many, this time spent in the enclosed space was akin to time in a confession box, and in the perceived suspension of time, sins a plenty would be discharged in the air, hanging for a while before dissolving.
Sometimes words would tumble out, rushing like the sea to the shore, releasing more with each wave. Other times words failed, so we sat in silence until time dislodged the minds' hold, and then an avalanche would ensue.
Regrets laid heavy on hearts that were now too frail to hold them. So many words were left unsaid for reasons now forgotten, about things that had long since lost their once-perceived importance.
Time was the scapegoat for almost everything, one way or another, and, most especially for all that remained on the imaginary bucket lists that hung in the recesses of best intentions.
Time was also the saviour, the gift that so many felt allowed them space to say what had always been left unsaid.
Many concluded that love mattered most when all was said and done. Old and young, bitter or resigned, it did not matter; there did not appear to be a pattern other than this universal conclusion.
I have since carried the wisdom of their words in my heart; for I have seen that time is indeed a gift and love really is all that matters.
What a role to have played in so many lives at their ending, Tracey. I love the way you have conveyed the almost geological nature of how personalities shift and their energies change towards the end. Yes, I recognise this from own experience working with those at end of life. Thank you as ever for how you are contributing to this project. Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/september-issue-on-time/#traceymayor
Txx
Thank you Tanya. I am as ever so very grateful for this opportunity to write in this space. Without it I don't know that I would have shared my words, my memories to the outside world.
Tracey xx
...but now you have begun, I forsee your writing journey moving out from here into many other places (while also hoping my themes will hold your interest so that you stay with us too!) xx
Oh yes for sure Tanya, I want to keep going on my writing journey! I feel that I have changed already. I am now feeling into everything with words rather than wondering how I might capture with a paintbrush. So exciting! xx
Thank you Tracey. Someday I hope to go back to the darkness at night, but for now I always have a chink of light somewhere. The restfulness that darkness offers is beautiful though! Sheila
You are very welcome Amy :-)
This is so beautiful... such loving, gentle dialogue. I feel I've got a glimpse here of your writing beyond this project - even if based on true events, this feels like part of a short story or novel...
I can't add this to the curate archive over on the book site, only because you are not present within the action of the story - this is (along with word-length, and some other key criteria) one of my submission criteria for tales that can be included.
Do take a look at these before your next piece, as I remain eager to include more work by you:
https://thecureforsleep.com/contributor-guidelines/
I hope you will use this piece in your own substack or consider finding a place to submit it for publication (if you haven't though of this already that is!)
Txxx
Tanya, I’m so sorry. I keep making work for you. :( I shall delete the first comment in the thread and hope it deletes all this so no one else sees what I’ve done and gets the same idea. Sorry again. M.
Please don’t delete - it’s a beautiful piece of writing & I have no concerns about it confusing others. I only need to hold to my project criteria so I can ensure a clear process for everyone (it also limits risk to me & these writing as writing about others is a tricky endeavour…).
I also need to remind the whole community of the submission criteria as now more people are joining they don’t always know how the project came about & for what - not should they. It’s on me to do updates now we’re in year three!
Keep writing here! But also be sending work to other places based on this. You’ve got a strong & good voice…
Xxx
Oh, Tanya. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again! Thank you again for your kind words, gentle reminders, and unwavering generosity. I’ll post it again below (as well as on my own little corner of Substack!). M.
- - - - -
Soul-tying
She called him to her.
“Genevieve.” A pause, seconds short, lifetimes long. “Ginny?”
She opened her eyes. Once a beautiful hazel now rheumy and opaque.
“You came.”
“Of course.”
“Sit with me.”
He sat. Listened to her laboured breathing, the breaths becoming shallower and easier with each one passing.
“Kiss me.”
He did.
His white bristles caused the old electricity to jump between them.
Ginny felt her soul leave her body. Instead of heading up, up into the everlasting May morning she knew awaited her, it skipped into a new (old, familiar) vessel.
That night, curtains wide, welcoming the stars and moon she’d loved so, he visited the jewelled memories, turning them over and over, feeling their weight, the sun’s warmth, before returning each to its well-worn place.
He’d truly loved her. She’d never voiced her feelings. A lifetime passed, and now he’d never know.
He felt a great joy swell in his chest. Poker-hot at first, it settled into something warm, cat-like. Heavy and reassuring as he lay in waxing moonlight.
A smile spread across his face as he relived the kiss. After they’d caught their breath they’d agreed it was time-stopping, soul-tying.
The cat on his chest purred, sensed the shift from reverie to sleep. She fed him sweet dreams of oaken kisses and summer rain-filled lanes.
He woke, felt the warm spot on his chest where until recently a comforting cat had been curled, waiting, and a sudden conviction took him.
Motorway hours, A-road minutes, lane seconds later he walked the route so beloved to them that short gift of a summer.
He sat under their oak, back against the sun-warmed bark. No rain today.
He thought of the kiss again and felt her soul slip away into the new, bright leaves. Thought he heard her laugh.