Last night from the bed I scanned the room in its complete darkness, looking for the mocking tick-tock sound that always rocks me. I wanted to obliterate the clock, how can anyone sleep to a sound that taunts you, reminding you of all the things put off again to do tomorrow. Hard awake yet trying to turn off the volume of the world through sleep, a cry punctured through my gut, every second, quicker than one deep breath, twenty-four cells within my body cease to exist.
Time is an enduring wave, eroding potential experiences, breaking apart mental pictures still unrealised.
I remember the conversation with my father about the mantelpiece at my Great grandmothers' house with its collection of ornaments, carefully graced into picturesque positions. Twin knick-knacks; the speckled shell hedgehogs, the gold Swiss toymaker shoes and the plates with bejewelled patterning. It's amusing how twos fill us up with a false safety, a hopeful dualism of never being alone, the hand-held solace of scanning and ordering the world into mirrored keepsakes.
The mantelpiece with its neat collection of ornaments remained just so for fifty-two years. Everything in its place; pink feather-dusting became a great art, you worked carefully around the pieces, for fear of knocking them off their thrones.
Yet after the final death at the old house, the mantelpiece with all its symmetrical trinketry just fell away like a grand landslide. I imagined a pyre, a wordless god, and a heavy-duty bin-bag. What was the point of fawning and dusting around them for the equivalent of a golden wedding anniversary plus the life and death of a goldfish, when within moments all is swept away.
Alone in a clear midnight, I reflect on what pieces I am keeping neatly for the sake of falling and breaking apart.
All anxiety derives from a desire for a moment, the need for an order that is unmovable, unbreakable.
And yet everything is pulling me to yield to a force that is beyond fixity, beyond what I can control; sudden realisations, dramatic loses, turning towards only the new are not the beginning or the end of anything but a reflection that all beginnings and ends are illusory, since there is no past or present outside my own mind.
Momentarily an insight like an ancient crevasse shows me my will as a force that will never disappear but disperse when I die, and that all life emerges from the same spring; all there is left to do is receive it for while and then relinquish it, the land giving way to the sea.
I am not an object shelved in a world. I am the world. I create the world. I am the life-force of continuing and everlasting change. Time punishes me by bin-bagging everything, but it also saves me by bin-bagging everything.