Year
Still inside
Still inside
Still inside, my house, my mind.
The first few weeks were a novelty. Time poured over us and thoughts poured into us like honey. When life stops and you get a chance to breathe and think with clarity about things you like to do, building your sanctuary seems easy. ”What do you want to do, now you have so much time for you?”
Self-sufficiency. Just me? Easy.
To my left are shelves full of bread. Olive, brown and white sourdough - bubbled and crisp like sunburnt skin. There is a pigeon nodding along in search of crumbs. Flakes of pastries scatter the floor, falling like dandruff on jeans, on shoes. They are still serving in takeaway cups. Earl grey to take away but sit in and suck up the tea stains on cardboard. How muggy - no mugs. The lid is turned upside down, patterned with spots of moisture like bathroom mould.
The cloud is thick and fast-moving, tempestuous in its will, mesmerising tired eyes with grey and silver shadow. The bulging under-belly rumbles deep overhead as white streaks crackle and fizz, cutting woolly fists like hot spears. A heaviness hangs in the air, dank above the moving trees - there is a certain fluidity to their movement - a graceful sway that jars with the ferocity of the wind. I place a warm palm on the window and my fingertips are traced by cold drops of rain. Slither down the glass; twist into each other - those transparent veins vying for the earth. It stirs something in me. Teaspoons chinked on glass skulls of thought. Messy, illuminating, a wild-eyed girl stuck behind two glass panes.
I have no time for dawdlers. My nanna and I burrow our way through the drowsy line of ants who shuffle in an orderly fashion towards the mouth of the sea, ignoring the old hag whose whiskery, prune-puckered lips voice a tut of disapproval. Slimy clots of seaweed cling to rusty chains, which tauten and creak like doddering old bones as the floating bridge gets ready to plod once again across the swells of water. A gush of froth and spray licks the side of the vessel which is burdened by a handful of vehicles, now packed snugly together like metal sardines, in midst of a flurry of foot passengers and the odd wiry cyclist. Sucking sloppily on a Fox’s glacier mint, I follow my nan, weaving past the cars towards the pedestrian area, watching as a snooty driver furrows his brow, hawk-eying a bicycle handle that passes dangerously close to his wing mirror. The steady rhythmic chug of the engine begins to vibrate through the rubber soles of nanna’s boat shoes, nudging its way up her purplish varicose veins, reverberating around her sagging kneecaps and tingling both of our bottoms as we perch on the slatted wooden benches side by side.
