palimpsest

I’ve been thinking some more about time.

Thinking back to those first posts I wrote about our ‘new life’ and the time I would have, the space. And how over the past few weeks I’ve felt like I used to in the city. No time. Claustrophobic. Irritable. And that got me to thinking about how time involves choice. It isn’t something that happens to us. It isn’t in charge of us. And although my physics is pretty ropey / non-existant, I’m pretty sure it isn’t even a constant. We can bend it, stretch it, waste it, evaporate it.

I’ve been elbowing my way through days of late, pushing time too hard, scrolling through it, wishing it away. And all the while I have this little man beside me, a wee man whose sense of time is so different to mine and whose reality I sometimes miss as I bulldoze along on my parallel tracks. There is time enough for many of the things I am worrying about, but Oscar’s won’t come around again. This Tiny Baby Time is of the rapid variety.

I’ve also been thinking about time in relation to some short stories I might write.

Two Guardian articles have stuck with me and are following me around. A report of a woman in the States who recently gave birth to a baby who was conceived two years after she was born. And a mother writing about how her twins, conceived in an instant, were born two years apart. I think of those parallel lives taking such different courses. Those embryos formed and then frozen, hovering there in a petri dish, probably not even visible to the human eye. Waiting, suspended, paused mid-leap in to life. Whilst along side them other lives have made the jump, their clocks have started ticking, their journeys have begun. The American woman living 24 years whilst the embryo waited for her to become its mother. Or those twins, one forging on ahead into life whilst the other waits for a radio signal to join.

I am also thinking back to a story I wrote a few years ago about a woman suffering from Alzeheimers. About the present moment that had disintegrated around her. The people’s faces, the day to day objects, the how-to-get-to-the-kitchen that fell away, crumbled before her eyes like that ancient city the monkeys lived in in The Jungle Book. But there was a still a past that she held with her glowing and poking its way through the cracks, sending semaphores forward through time. How she couldn’t remember what to do with a kettle but could walk down the canal to Patrick Kavanagh’s bench to meet a lover she had had 50 years before.

And I am thinking about the walls of the Rotunda and the ghost that they say walks the downstairs hall. A mother, perhaps, from 100, 200 years past. Caught up and circling and crisscrossing, refusing to obey the rules of a linear version of time.