Approximately 800 words
by Ann Davie
I close my eyes. Light passes and fades, flushing and fluttering behind my eyelids. Wind ebbs and builds, carrying earthy scents away. Tinkling, hollow echoes, laughing, wounding screeches, chattering, nattering, cries laden with sadness, and whispers tender and sweet. Sounds shift into focus and pass quickly into faded hues.
I've asked for more time, someone else's or mine. I'm not particular. It doesn't matter, I just want more.
I open my eyes and see the dried grass of late summer. Fields of raw silk spun as far as I can see. In the distance, I make out the purple smudge of remote hills. It seems as if I've been standing here, like a tree, growing and weathering the seasons. I can recognize the sprightly chirr-up of each summer's cricket. I sense the loneliness in the needy caw of every autumn's crow. I've felt the earth freeze and thaw a million times over. Every change still stirs me.
As I look up, the clouds roll and fold. Their once stark whiteness has now changed to the saturated anger of storm clouds. I watch as their shadows glide over the dancing grasses. It's as if this were my first experience of rain, the heady scent of impending downpours fills me with an anxious electricity. The air is alive, buzzing and charged with some unseen awareness that life and death can come from the same violent actions that are soon to unfold.
I close my eyes again as the first drop falls.
Before I open them again, I pause to listen to the thick, wet sounds of a horse plodding down a mud track. His rough braying and wheezing snorts convey the displeasure at having to pull a heavy load in such conditions.
I open my eyes to the mist covered fields. The golden fabric now replaced by tilled loam exposing jagged clumps of earth and rock. Time has brought the intervention of an unseen human element. Secretly working away in the background and before I know it, buds of houses and farms dot the green expanse. Rivers of roads form, sending a speeding torrent of progress along with the flow.
But I don't want watch the familiar spring forth. I've seen the results of my isolated timeline. I want to step to the side, shift dimensions and take in the vistas never seen. Or perhaps, I should examine the secret knolls that have remained hidden from view. There's so much I have missed as I've skimmed and skipped, never taking the time to let my feet sink into the ground around me.
I lift my foot, loosening it from the rich earth around me. I step gingerly and see the horizon spin. Colors bleed and blur until my balance had been restored. Lining a wide boulevard, naked chestnuts raise their stunted arms and bony fingers to a soft spring sky. The road of blue stone has endured horses' hooves, cartwheels, and tires, barely registering the effect. A set of cobbled steps lead down to the river, slowly carrying the discarded blooms from the spent cherry trees high up on the bank.
I know this place. The time is still mine, but how lovely to be back. The soaring feeling of being somewhere foreign, by myself, on my own brings tears. My first taste of something new, and it's all mine to savor over and over again. My sheltered youth is shattered on a glorious early spring day in Paris - a time when I was first seduced by the possibilities.
I step tentatively the other way and find myself confronted by all the moments when I was wrong. All those optimistic possibilities have been vaporized. Self-loathing and guilt grip every thought, tainting the memory of victories grand and small. I find it almost impossible to pull away. What is this fascination for blaming myself? I realize that I need not stay mired here. There is always one more step to be taken.
This time I stretch myself further. The anticipation of the complete unknown is as alluring as that spring day so many years ago. I know time will never disappoint me again.
So unexpected. Thick accents chant around me, lure me into secret dens of filtered, purple-scented light. In the coolness, dust settles over the damp ground. This time is not mine. I look down at my hands. My skin is like oiled leather, soft and supple, but dark and rich. The rough linen of my sleeves so stark against my arms. How strange to be someone else.
I step again and again, pacing through time and place. Back before the first footstep, leaping forward to lives unknown. Changing, morphing, from youth to aged, now or then, man or woman. Each new soul brought to life.
Here on this page. I have the time I've always wanted.