Time

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 pee at 3 a.m., 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 32 kmph. 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 de courcy

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.

My last consultant had 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 Connor

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, to 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 fentiman

‘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 this 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.

jean wilson

Three in the Morning

*

I never have trouble getting to sleep. Head hits the pillow and I’m out for the count. It is staying asleep that is the problem. Covers off, legs out the bed, nightie stuck to a clammy body, damp sheets. I’m sure the wine makes it worse, with the sweating, fidgeting and feeling of utter wretchedness that comes at three in the morning.

Then there is the snoring husband: elbows out, hands behind head, mouth open.

‘Roll over!’

‘What?’

‘Roll over, you’re snoring.’

I shove his shoulder. I kick his hip with my foot. He holds his breath while he shifts, then bellows like a cow from our farmyard.

I’m wide awake. I need a wee. Back in bed thoughts race with a miasma of worry. The pandemic has coated everything with an oil slick of unease. Thoughts dart and dash: the phone call with my mother – she’s broken her shoulder, tripping over her palazzo pants. My brother thinks I should go down to Sussex to see her. I think about the shopping – should I go to Aldi or can we make do with what we’ve got?

He sticks an arm out.

‘Have a cuddle.’

I rest my head on his shoulder. His shoulder bones dig into my ear socket and the hairs from his chest tickle my nose. He is snoring again.

I give up and head for one of three empty rooms by the torchlight of my phone. I pick up a teddy that sits on the bed. Hug it tight. Inhale. Then slip between cool, clean sheets and sink into memory foam bliss.

Sue reed

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

Amy Millios

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 too?

Once I told him: Yes, its true.

Molly cooper

I am here by my bookcase of thick cherry planks, one shelf devoted to books telling me how not to suffer…read, then 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 knell

It was time for the patient to go home and say goodbye, and 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 aplenty 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 mind’s 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. But 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.

Tracey Mayor

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 Nineties 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 our mum’s 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 won’t hold any more.

I pour the hot, soapy liquid from 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 Longshaw

For several minutes I walked without taking my eyes off the stars as if I was Michelangelo gazing up at the Sistine Chapel. I started to feel a little dizzy then 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 everett

The Blanket

I’m looking at photographs. There is one of my four children sitting on a large throw made of brightly coloured knitted squares. The kids are ‘heads down’, juggling sandwiches and cups of juice. The blanket is laid out on pale sand. Behind them marram grasses are clumped into smiles. I remember it being windy – the reason the children appear to be concentrating hard on their picnic.

In another picture – me and my sister are sitting on the same blanket in pretty much the same place. Momentarily, time is no longer a line but a circle.

The throw, made from red, yellow and blue squares of thick wool, was knitted by my grandmother. I have a vague memory of it draped over her bed but no recollection of its transformation to picnic blanket, and of course, neither my mother or grandmother are here to ask. Mum must have repurposed it at some point.

The woollen squares, sewn together at least 70 years ago, are folded up and kept ‘safe’ in my cupboard. The blanket, a work of art in my eyes, needs mending. There are several holes and some of the squares have become untethered from their companions. I’m loathe to do anything to it, partly because I lack the skill but mainly because I’m afraid that if I try all the memories will unravel and escape. While safely in the cupboard the wool retains its colours, and I can hold onto my memories of happy seaside days as granddaughter, daughter, mother, and keep them as fresh as a sea breeze. 

But then I think of my own grandchildren. The blanket should come back into the light, to life. Its purpose is to scoop up more stories. Repaired, aired and used, it would be holding five generations worth.

annie worsley

Pen to Paper

When has time taken on a strange new dimension?

I could say it’s today. It is the here and now. My new dimension on this day, the 29th of February, a leap year, as I sit and write. A longing that has been buried deep within me for so long. Now here I am. Pen to paper. With a question that evokes deep contemplation. A moment to pause and to look into life’s mirror, see my soul reflected and I ask it this very question.

There does not seem to be one singular event, not one moment of awakening. Rather a steady stream of self-destruction, rebirth, growth, and self-actualization. A repeated pattern spiralling upwards in which each moment a deeper understanding of oneself develops. A sparking of an inquisitive mind examining the web of life we lead. Each circle, each dimension, revealing the many facets of my own being. A gentle ageing, for which I am eternally grateful. This life, my life, on this beautiful planet with those I dearly love around me.

Yet those cathartic moments that stand out are born from trauma, from loss and unforeseen circumstances. As life’s wheel turns but perhaps not in the direction we had planned it should. It is those moments we must dig deep into the core of our own being. Connecting with a primal instinct of survival. These are the moments that propel us into new dimensions and teach us our greatest lessons.

Each and every cycle we complete, there is a peeling back of those false identities, these layers of protection. Exposing one’s true self. Strange new dimensions are a journey, not a destination. A continuing wonderful journey that has led to this very moment.

Right here, right now. Pen to paper.

nicola veal

I sit, still and quiet beside my mother, as she sleeps, or dreams, or hovers somewhere outside herself waiting to leave.

She lies, as if carved from some pure clean material unrelated to flesh, skin stretched taught over the fine bones of her face; eyelids waxy pale. I shake her, gently, hoping to make her stir, to see her eyes find mine, as they always have, see a recognition of sorts break over her face. But I feel only her warm bones, like a small bird, fragile beneath the blankets. Taking her hand, I sink with her into the muffled warmth of this place of fading.

A glimmer of something pulls me back. A perfume bottle, startling amongst the detritus of sickness; nearly empty, just a slick of amber gleaming at the bottom. Tipping the glass against my wrist, the golden scent the ghost of my mother as she once was. Her vivid cleverness and badly concealed vanity; her stubbornness and laughter; sharp prickliness and sudden kindness.

All day I am startled by the presence of this scent that does not belong to me. It is with me as I collect my children from school; as I stand in my kitchen preparing supper; as I move around my house at dusk, preparing for bed. 

I remember how, as a child going away to boarding school, I sprayed this perfume into a small soapstone box, trapping the scent inside. At night, in the dormitory unable to sleep I would inhale the smell of my mother and feel some comfort, feel that I had her with me.

That night I take the small bottle from where I have hidden it under socks and slips in my chest of drawers, as if it were stolen contraband. I touch the scent to my pillow.

Sally wetherall

It’s A Matter Of Time

As the late great Douglas Adams wrote in The HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: ‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.’

But even though illusionary, its presence is always around us. I live in the City that the world sets its clocks by.
 
I always loved that a commoner invented a pendulum clock that worked at sea and thus gave birth to Greenwich Mean Time. I love too, the fact that having done so, John Harrison had to pursue the state for his million pound prize and that his life force ran out just after getting it, leaving the funds to his son.

See, it’s where time and age intersect that really changes everything. I remember asking my mother what it was like to be old. I was ten, she was mid fifties, and responded ‘I don’t recognise the woman I see in the mirror.’

I’m beginning to get a sense of that myself. The loosening skin, the change in facial shape, the hair loss.

But with so many friends and celebrities dying at my age or way younger, time has taken on an entirely new meaning to me. It’s become the countdown to the end of life.

As part of the London Library Emerging Writers programme 2021/22 I had the great fortune to meet and befriend John O’Farrell. His new musical, currently playing at the Old Vic as I write this, Just For One Day, tells the story of Bob Geldof staging the largest concert ever mounted in history – Live Aid – which took him just ten weeks from idea to completion.

I couldn’t get a response to a single email to the Department of Work and Pensions in that time period.

Jonathan Larson’s final musical captures my sense of trying to do more with the time I have left perfectly though, its titled…

Tick, Tick…Boom!

paul atherton

On The Other Side Of The World

‘This is the Catford Traffic Police.’
‘Oh. Has my car been nicked?’
‘Are you able to talk?’

My brain whirred with mind-chatter. But it didn’t prepare me for what came next.

The words bashed around my head like dodgems at a fairground. Dad. Hit by a car. Air ambulance. Died instantly. Head injury. Multiple broken bones. Nothing they could do. Worked on him for an hour. On his way to the bowls club. Could I tell Mum?

I put my head against the glass wall and sunk to the floor. I knew I had to be strong and get ready to share the news as carefully as I could. She’d only landed from London two days before.

Minutes felt like hours as I searched the streets of my Melbourne suburb. Peering into coffee shops, pausing at the tram stop, and over to the marina. Nope, not there. It was then I spotted her crossing the road. My bright red bag on her shoulder, a determined look on her face. She was exploring on her own, her face taking in the warmth of the rays on this January day. I hesitated.

Just give her a few more moments of happiness.

She was looking very pleased with herself having gone three blocks to get a box of cornflakes, and about to book an appointment at the hairdressers. All of this excited chatter about her adventure came tumbling out, and I wondered at what point to tell her the news.
 
‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’

I held Mum’s hand. I felt as though my words were spoken in slow motion, as if someone else was saying them. Her mouth fell open, frozen in time. Nothing came out. I had just destroyed her world.

vanessa wright

There’s an antique clock that’s found its home on my desk and it thinks it can boss me around. It has a hollow tick that echoes and on the hour it tolls in a tuneless, sullen voice that reminds me of funerals.
 
I felt guilty and ungrateful when we opened the clock face and stopped the pendulum, though if I accidently move my desk, the brass pendulum picks up on the jolt and starts to swing again in an endless motion that never hesitates to file my thoughts away before I’m done.
 
There is nothing beautiful about this clock we inherited apart from the wooden case. It is ignorant of the fact that time can inch forward softly and slowly, like honey, like when I slept all snug under the stars on a top deck on the Aegean Sea.

Try telling this clock, that when I’m lying flat-bellied on the beach, photographing sea-kissed shells, that time turns to mist. It will never believe that in those moments, I just am and the horizon just is. I listen only to the pendulum from the gods in the waves. They make me feel alive. Neither would it believe me if I said that time was a dance when I was falling head-over-heels. Then the beat of my heart swooned only to the second hand of love.

This clock could accompany a drumroll, and time overruled by fear, like when a furious, drugged-up driver rammed our car and held us hostage at a red traffic light, while our babies, strapped in the back seats, watched their parents, incredulous and scared. This clock resonates with those seconds that dragged like lead in water, that stumbled in clumsy thuds to my stomach.
 
No wonder its golden polished face only glows in silence in honour of time.

pipp warner

I experienced, and I was, the most divine of moments at Dawn.

It wasn’t the exquisiteness of pranayama with my love before light seeped around corners. Nor was it our cross-legged talk of whether doing the wonder or domestics, our energies dance, be together in the most beautiful ease. It wasn’t feeling the deepest sense of self as awareness sank into every nasal breath and my shape expanded beyond skin. It wasn’t feeling the glorious shape of all that Birdsong as it sang circles into me. Nor when I connected this feeling of the spirals of gold magic drawn by the wand of Sleeping Beauty’s Fairy Godmother awed on a cinema screen aged five with Him.

It was the moment I sat in disappointment, being told that my glorious layers of Birdsong that had held me in time-place were actually someone else’s Birdsong, digitised into my Mac in accompaniment of instruction. I was rapturing on the wonder of breath and Birds to my Sound Engineer love and He casually questioned whether they were on the recording. It was watching my imagined morning’s writing of ‘The Wonder’ slip less graciously out of hands. It was replaying how my monkey mind had artfully turned the volume down on thoughts that didn’t match my thinking. It was remembering my dismissal of the tinge of a question when eyes met a bedroom window closed and ears received a diluted Birdsong once class was over.
 
My divine moment was this assemblage and absorption at Dawn. A galactic swirl of feelings and aha’s landing in me, that the recorded Birdsong was the point, the truth of connection between sounds and spaces and people and of no time. My Birdsong layered with His and Hers and Theirs, in a cosmic lasagna of now.

joanna hall

Twenty five years past, I am lithe and not yet twenty-four. It is the first of August and a perfect summer day in its quintessence; sunshine tempered by the gentlest breeze. On summer break and working retail, I am crammed by duties at which I am failing. I am supposed to be attending to my best friend the day before her wedding but my overwhelmed self needs to slip away into the arms of my beloved and feel their warmth wash over me and be consumed.

I need to not exist.

I pull on my swimsuit and drive to the shore. Swimming, this beach with its inter-tidal pools is a favourite of families and this day is no exception. Hermit crabs, eel-grass and glimmering fish entrance little ones. You have to go a distance to get to any depth.

Over barnacle-encrusted rocks I wade through pools onto wet sand, then to mid-calf and eventually over the last visible sandbar to waters which lap first my knees, then lick my thighs. I breathe deep and shallow dive as a shudder of water caresses me. Once and many, I dive and frolic, rising vainglorious like the mermaid I imagine myself to be. Then, like a breath you didn’t know you were holding, I slip out of the constraints of human skin, beyond any sense of self and I become water, air and sunshine; one with all.

Forever passes and something shifts like wind. I feel overcast and cold. I am again a body in a world of want and expectation. Panic rises like the tide on a rocky outcrop. Things to do. Places to be. The water’s now cement-like and my legs are jellyfish. I remember I forgot sunscreen and think of the gown I’ll wear tomorrow. What folly!

Jill MacCormack

 I was travelling backwards in time. Minus five hours, London to New York. For each hour lost, I imagined erasing five years of my life, until I arrived, stripped back almost to the beginning and able to start again. 
The city didn’t care who I’d been, or what I hadn’t become. The only baggage was being unceremoniously dumped onto the carousel, and the only anxiety that raised was of being lost. The rest I let go of, willingly.

This was to be the first year of my making myself. Not making something of myself as such, but simply making myself. I didn’t much like what I’d been made to be, or what people had made me out to be.
I knew I’d only have the same 365 days this year that I’d had every other, but the difference was that I would own these days. I, a version of me, unconstrained by family expectations, or darker even, the desires of older men, for a childlike me. I was far from innocent and tired of being small. In this city, I’d meet my match.

I’ve since discovered that we experience days as shorter, as our brains slow with age. We can’t process as much information in the same time period. It’s a cruel trick when you have less time than others. That year seemed to have no end: perhaps time also shrinks when we have to be someone we are not, and stretches once we can breathe again.

laura

It was a strange game that we played when a new girl came to join our eleven plus year in the convent. She was different, announcing she was English – previously I’d never thought about us coming from assorted Catholic countries: Ireland, Italy, Poland…

The game was to be played out of sight of Mrs Drayson who monitored breaktimes, so we played it around the back of the building where it was drab and unused. Someone had to volunteer to squat down in the middle of the small circle of girls and breathe deeply in and out. After thirty breaths the centre girl stood, and was squeezed tightly around her midriff by the large initiator. This would result in a second’s collapse, but also the most extraordinary visions: fantasies that seemed to go on and on; travel in a timeless zone, the longest dream imaginable. It was hard to come back.

We were caught and reprimanded, the game was dangerous and we were banned from playing it. The instigator denied all knowledge of her involvement.

Since those days, Time been a concept that’s played its own games. In waking life I’ve wandered close to thin places, and even ventured through portals – entered other times.

And then when training to be a homeopath, and accepting the offer to prove (test) Time as a remedy, those experiences were taken to another level.

Previously, I was someone who naturally ran late, enjoying the adrenaline rush, the speeding and excuse to test my rally-driving skills so as to catch a plane or ferry. The remedy Time created a bizarre suspension: for months time seemed to lose hold, all meaning. I could leave late, be slowed by cows crossing and other events, and yet arrive early. I’m still perplexed, but allow for ample time.

marika O’S

Here and There

There was nothing to say where I ended and the wood began; everything that scurried and shimmered, fluttered and sang was within me and I, somehow, was inside myself but also leaping through the tree canopy on squirrel feet; somewhere I was the colour of autumn bracken, sniffing the air before I slinked out of a den that my human self had not yet discovered.

It was not entirely unlike the feeling I’d had when I was giving birth to my second son and the pain and hard labour of heaving him into this world were approaching the kind of crescendo that is the closest most of us come to knowing our primitive selves, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with the sense that I was about to die. It was so intense it took the shape of words although I don’t believe I said them out loud, but the instant the feeling became a thought I seemed to momentarily leave my body and began to float above it, free of all the pain even as I was still in its clutches. There was comfort in it. I was neither here nor there and yet I was both, but that meant I wasn’t the pain, it hadn’t consumed me. A short while later, my son was born.

I rarely thought about the experience in the years that followed. Occasionally I would skirt the edges of my memory of it like a child putting her fingers too close to the fire then quickly pulling them away, but whenever I did I questioned this notion of self and separateness.

Sitting in the wood on the seat of my bones as the sun rose, I questioned it again.

claire everett

The Shape of Time

When I was born, time was an arrow. Bowstring pulled taut then released, time had a single direction and a single destination. The forward movement of this sort of time shaped my childhood and young adulthood. Elementary school was followed by middle followed by high. Undergraduate degree followed by graduate followed by professional certification followed by career. Living within this perception, a moment passed was a moment lost.

The shape of time was invisible to me just as water is to the fish that swims in it, until one day the veil of the Universe was pulled back just for a moment and I saw time as a cycle. While I was moving relentlessly forward to the tune of ‘extensions’ and ‘filing deadlines,’ the trees planted far below my cubicle were changing the color of their leaves – dancing within the ever-cycling wheel of the year.
 
When my first child was born, time lost all shape. No arrow, no cycle, the experience a blur shared by many new parents. This disorientation caused me to lose my way in time. A full thirty days passed before I righted myself and the arrow resumed its steadfast travels. But life with a newborn, a wildling not yet shaped by culture, refused to conform to the arrow’s flight.

When time shifted again I was ready. Time as an arrow was pulling us toward schooling and the familiar path of childhood, but as the wildlings grew we chose a different path. Time expanded as we were slowly pulled back into the rhythm of the seasons. Back to its original earthly shape, time became fully a cycle and a moment passed became a moment to revisit on the next cycle. Time was an arrow, but now it is a circle, a cycle, a rhythm, a dance.

michelle reich

The Bone

I’m not sure how long I traversed planets, their galaxies exploding into stars; a car hit mine on a tiny country lane as I returned from the market is all I recall. It was instant, a spinning body detached from mind into a ceaseless orbital of agonising pain…

Briefly I return, precious seconds, clamorously clinging to corporeality, enough to clutch seven months of unborn baby as pain slips quietly into fear. They overlap, return and dissipate. Undisciplined waves.

I am conscious of others talking… a paramedic perhaps? I clear creases of residual stars from encephalon, attempt movement again, try to form words in answer to their concerns but erudite signals malfunction. Two words form in a whispered question – ‘my baby?’ – before I part company from fixed space once more. Only now the stars spin, dissolve, reemerge, explode in myriad shades of white – I am – float slowly down and are extinguished – I am not – one by one. On repeat.

I am, I am not, ethereally floating above myself, watching the folding and unfolding I cannot control.

I reattach but each movement threatens stars again. Professional hands, gently urgent and insistent, transport me in my orbiting pain. I feel like I am being held hostage to trauma in sterile blue. Lying, strapped to my anguish, traveling again, safe but breathing via a mask attached to many plastic tubes.

Somebody is holding my left foot, I feel panic threatening to escape, I need to speak, to reconnect the connections. The effort is supreme and erupts in screaming, garbled, and foul words…

‘My baby… why are you holding my fucking foot? What about my fucking baby?’

Hysteria threatens, lands, and is swept away.

‘ Your baby isn’t distressed, Madam, but you have broken your foot, a bone is protruding, we must remove your shoe.’

susie mawhinney

It’s just an inconspicuous headstone. You’ll find it nestled safely in a grassy nook where one wall of the little Minstead church meets another at right angles. It’s far less showy than the nearby tomb where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lies; there’s no added adornment, no pipe and magnifying glass, for Thomas Maynard, who died in 1817, aged only twenty-seven years.

I found it through reading a book of New Forest walks, written in the 1930s by the marvellous, tweed-clad Joan Begbie, who strode across the Forest with her two dogs. For two years I followed in Joan’s bootsteps, learning the local nature and lore. Joan became an almost tangible presence at my side. And she led me, through her words, to Thomas Maynard’s grave.

Graveyards are beautiful, I think, with their timeless stories. Thomas was a musician in the South Hants Yeomanry and on his headstone, erected by his fellow band players, there is carved that curious wind instrument called the serpent. I wish I could have heard him play.

Standing by his grave, on that first visit in midsummer, I experienced, and still vividly recall, a blurring of time. There is Thomas in his grave in 1817. Joan stands here, in the 1930s, and now here am I, almost a century later. Who will stand sentinel in another hundred years? They also are here. We clasp hands across the years, we strangers who are friends.

The second time I visited, in winter’s heart, I found a piece of gently frayed bark fallen from an ancient Yew and felt it right to place it on Thomas’s grave. Yews symbolise not only immortality, but also renewal.

Death, birth, life past, present and future. People lost, people found. We are joined, not parted, by the turning of the years.

amanda scott

Mater Mother…

Bones matter. They do, they do. They mother. Mother you, mother me. Oh how they sing the bones inside me. You hear it. I do, I do. The great mother hums now. Rising with this dawn mist from her damp skin folds everything in. Touch your collarbone now. She hums there now and now. Oh how I wanted you all this time. To speak to me and hold me. You do, you do. Now and now. Wrapping your song your water around and through me. Who loved her body first? I ask. Who loved her own body first? HUUUUUUUUU Softly she hums the beloved in her full power now recognized acknowledged inevitable as the fresh green buds on these branches. The wave of existence softly sighing now and now until young soft leaf until five-petaled bloom illuminate this space between one branch and the other between one bone and the other. Her hum weaves ecstatic by which I say it comes out of her like damp mist making all of it appear now. By which I mean all of it laced in her the complicated ramifications of being here and knowing it. Who she? Whose huuuuuuuuuuuuu HUUUUUUUUU No more questions now.

Une

A crackle of cockatoos breaks the silence, squawking loudly, white feathers and sulphur crests brilliant against the clear blue sky. It is a muggy Sydney morning, I am not dressed for this weather, although my dark somber clothes are fitting for my calling today.

I am the ceremonalist at a graveside farewell for a dear friend’s mother. The heat is oppressive, my heart pounding a little too powerfully. A good case of nerves I suspect as this is my first time conducting this sacred End of Life Passage. The weight of my own sense of smallness, the fear of somehow not doing right by this family, cloying at my throat.

The mourners are gathering under a shade gazebo. I am standing closer to the casket, alone, fully exposed to sun and scrutiny. As I collect myself to begin, a funeral director steps forward with an umbrella, I welcome the shade and his solid steady presence at my shoulder.

My words settle into an ebb and flow, the tempo of laughter entwined with tears. A steady abiding rhythm gently carrying us to the faithful ending. Soon enough, we are there. The casket is poised ready to be lowered, I need only to begin the final words of committal.

A gentle breeze teases across us, then stillness. A peaceful sense of grace washes over me. Every tree, bird, insect, angel above and ancestor below, pause like a gentle inward breath, listening for the Holy Moment. I fell into an ancient timeless void, my heart expanded a hundred times or more, touching everything and everyone with a love so great it almost took me to my knees.

A heartfelt sob – the goodbye lament of a daughter – breaks the enchantment. The casket begins its descent into the warm tender earth. Far far away, I hear a choir of angels singing a rapturous homecoming.

carole mahood

A hospital corridor, bright paintings stretched along its length. With a parent on each arm, I understand now that they rely upon me entirely; they are frightened, vulnerable. In this place, time reversed our roles: I am a needed steadiness and confidante, a compass point in their retreating landscape.

Afterwards, the last acts of housekeeping. Time seems suspended, each room adrift: a pair of binoculars, bereft, waiting; unopened medicines; a handbag on the back of a door; lipstick in a drawer; photographs of holidays: his film-star looks; her camera-shy, turning away. For them, possessions took the place of a familial affection neither had felt nor witnessed, a way to renounce a poverty-chastened past. As a girl lacking empathy, I was dismissive of such clumsy adornment, unaware that spending money felt like respectability if you believed you came from nowhere.

What I’m trying to say is about love. About two people who were flawed yet honourable in their own way of things. People without education yet with experiences that taught them the hard way about their worth. I return to them in writing this down. They would like to be remembered like this; knowing them, I know this is true. They would like that in the town, people still talk about them, that their deaths were notable being only two days apart – father dead in the rain, mother’s death certificate folded in his pocket.

There might be a tightness in me – a hurt, unloved part that portrays my parents to you aslant when truthfully they were more than my smallness would allow for.

When I walk outside early, I bring light to my unseeing, hold all our truths with compassion. In the sincerity lent by daybreak, they come towards me smiling: Sinatra is playing, we are home.

Donna Maynard

The windows began at the floor and ended at the ceiling. It was autumn. The tree outside grew slowly naked under my gaze. Its unwanted leaves gathering on the ground beneath impressive boughs become my only grasp on an outside world or time itself existing at all.

It is a room for people not to be trusted. A lamp is stuck down to the mass-produced pine table at the bedside, generic pictures of uninspiring landscapes are glued to walls. Reserved for newcomers or the ‘at risk’. I am both.

I am in a mixed psychiatric hospital; mixed in gender, age and diagnosis, fifty miles from my home and from my family. I am fourteen years old, and I have been told that my inability to eat is an illness.

Barbara sits on the bed. Her uniformed frame hunched and exuding hostility. She must get me to consume a biscuit, a digestive, presented to me on a saucer. I politely refuse, observing good manners as a terrifyingly violent rage takes over my insides. Maintaining an empty body is all I have cared about for some time. I wasn’t about to give that up.

I often wonder why I did eat Barbara’s biscuit? I was young and had been taught to respect figures of authority – Barbara didn’t warrant my respect, but she was Authority. I had eaten that biscuit as if it were doused in poison, every crumb leading to my demise; as if it were the pure embodiment of evil – polluting and corrupting with every swallow I took; as if it were the end of anything that ever mattered, with heartbroken screams, my fists delivering blow after blow to my stomach, punishing it for its betrayal.

I stayed for 9 months in that hospital; Barbara stayed for 3 days.

natalie dawson

Days and Nights

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.

Joanna Baker