NOTE: You can now hear me reading this story on MixCloud
When It Is Time
by Caledonia Skytower
© 2020
In memory of Elizabeth
Cullen
Time.
Time. I wanted more time.
She
cradled in my hands: fragile, imperfect, diminishing.
Her
bubble of being had once encompassed a broad sphere. At some point she became
the object of my life, rather than its influence. In the fullness of time she
began to shrink, her focus narrowed, her view spare.
As with
such certainties, it's easy to ascribe them to an undefined future: the
inevitable that will happen in some comfortably vague tomorrow. I held her as
delicately as I could, aware of the looming presence of that inevitability. It
was time, and I wanted more of it.
More
delicate spheres floated about, but this one remained gently resting in my hands,
shaking ever so slightly. Surfaces turned and swirled around us. I heard water
falling and felt something wet on my cheek. Beyond the edge it got sharp and
dark. Neither of us knew what was out there. We seemed to be alone on this
precipice together, clinging to one another in the hopes that time could
somehow continue as it had. We had cast that moment of change from
our minds for years and years. It would happen someday.
Finally,
someday had arrived. Someday was now.
Then
everything ceased. Slowly she deflated until she was gone. Time stopped. Not
a crack of thunder, a cosmic scream, or even a pop. Like pushing on a wall
that suddenly disappeared - nothing more to lever against - I was in a void and
completely alone. It was so very quiet. Other spheres kept spinning,
water ebbed and flowed, wind moved the leaves. It was noiseless and
distant to me. I was numb.
We had
gone so high, so long. I was without her for the first time in my life, and so
near the edge. Where did it lead? How was I supposed to go from here? Would
there ever be time again?
My
questions became more personal. Had I loved her for who she was, and not who I
would have liked for her to be? Had I said everything that I meant to say - the
truths of forever that move beyond frustrations of now? Had she known all of that
- any of it?
I stood,
recognizing that I could not stay here in this silent, timeless moment forever.
I had no idea of how to continue. Everywhere I looked was an edge to a
nothingness. I was afraid. Perhaps it would be easier to stay caught in this
forever where nothing changed, nothing spoke: a perpetual intake of breath that
never exhaled.
But
that's not life. That's not living. That's not what she taught me
so long ago when she made silly jokes at the kitchen table; when she grabbed my
sleeve on a Sunday morning excited there was no line at the theme park ride;
when she said, "things can never be so bleak that you can't manage some
ice cream." I would have to face the precipice and whatever cataclysm waited
there. There were no preconceptions or expectations. This was all new
territory. Everything seemed to spin as I walked to the edge, and a faint click
sounded in the distance.
My toes
reached the edge, and I was greeted by a lazy purple turtle. It was something I
had not seen before. In fact the land was filling with details that I had been
blind to before: falling waters, flowers, lights, creatures of many kinds. And
there were words too - words of love, little things said over decades:
"please, thank you, love you, my daughter."
The
turtle was a guide, a marker to a sparkling path away from the height. It had
not been an end but a pause with a whole universe of the possible waiting around
it for when the time was right to move on. As I stepped carefully down, I heard
the tinkling of moving water. Then the rush of a gusting breeze joined in, the
many sounds of life, and the ticking of clocks gently greeted my ears.
It all
unfolded for me: time always in motion, life in progress, the ever presence of "being." I
had stopped. Time had not. Now I faced a choice: remain lost to time, or
step back into life with all its known-unknowables, and certain-uncertainties.
I looked
down the path. It wasn't straight or even. It might not have even been solid. I
stepped forward anyway. I stepped back into time and began a new journey on an
unfamiliar path. Somewhere, somehow along the way I knew . . . there would be
ice cream.
##
(written for recent events, and for Fantasy Faire 2020)
No comments:
Post a Comment