Solstice

She tells me that today is the longest day. Tells me too as if it is a conspiratorial secret, as if it would make me want to leap up and embrace her, kiss the child-like grin that places ripples of echoes of grins further up on her rounded cheeks. Wreathed in smiles. Please don’t stop being wreathed in smiles.

The longest day, and you’re awake. You’re awake.

I’m awake, yes, I reply, unsure if it’s really true. But, I protest, I haven’t been anywhere. I was here the whole time. I saw trains pulling into the station outside my window; the world turning upside down when I opened my eyes; people stretched out beneath me as I perched in this precarious nest of cushions, fixed and frozen for fear of falling. I saw digital figures ticking the seconds off until some cataclysmic event, then merely signalling an electronic beep and flipping back to the start of a seemingly never-ending countdown when that decisive moment was reached. Endless flashing numbers.

I don’t know who she is from Eve - or Adam, come to that - yet I whisper my secret back to her. I giggle, almost uncontrollably. I saw ostriches, you know. Ostriches. Or flamingoes. Whichever. Who cares? They were here, that’s all that matters. Tall, gangly birds. I saw them, and don’t you dare tell me that I didn’t. One of them took a photo of this empty shell in which I’m lying by rising and looming over me with its lens. Now don’t tell me that didn’t happen, because I know it did.

Something hurts. I’m not sure where.

Pumped full of metals, pumped full of liquids. Feeling seasick whilst being weighted down and barred in leads to vomit leads to nausea. Violently thrown back and forth across a tempestuous ocean of chemical reaction. And each reaction only leads to catatonic inaction. That very fact surely makes this woman unreal. A fiction. An imagining. She’s talking and touching my hand - don’t touch, don’t even fucking touch, what the hell are you doing? - but she has your voice and her voice and his voice, all of them calling to me through this woollen, heavy-lidded haze. The longest day. It’s the longest day, my dear.

Don’t call me dear. Not your dear. Not yours. No one else’s, but certainly not yours. That confuses me beyond where I already am.

I have things to do, I tell her. I can’t stay here. I promised to call him. I promised to write to her. I am meeting them for a drink, because we have plans of vast import but little consequence. I have a half-finished document languishing on my desk. Must be done by Wednesday, whenever that might be. So I ask her. Is that today? Today is Wednesday, right? I have to get out of here, then. Things to do. No hurry, she tells me. No hurry, child. Longest day today. Dawn ‘til dusk is endless. You’ve got hours. Hours and hours of forevertime.

She directs my gaze to the window. I screw up my eyes against the yellow, piercing glare and almost retch. If this is what one single minute of forever looks like, you can take it. And can you take the dull hammering in my skull while you’re at it?

Her fingers rest on the back of my hand once more, and this time I’m grateful. Nothing makes sense, and even as I begin to faintly recall that I am supposed to be that bundle of nerves and neuroses who too often recoils from sudden uninvited touches, this softest of dark and wrinkled hands is welcome. She tells me to sleep. Tells me that I’ll understand everything when I wake up, in my own time. Longest day, remember? No rush, child. No rush.

I never saw her again, whoever she was. True enough, I saw and spoke to her physical manifestation many times over the months. When it came time to finally depart, since she had been the first person I remembered setting my dazed and trick-playing eyes upon, it was also entirely natural for me to go and bid her a fond farewell.

That morning, however, as she stood beside me for a few spare minutes amid the bustle and warmed my hand in hers, she was the embodiment of all the people I have ever met, all the people I have never met; the spirit of all those to be treasured in the past, the present and the future.

This everywoman’s soothing touch and her whispered words helped me to sleep away that lost Summer Solstice, one that I’ll never get back. No matter. Wherever she is on this midsummer evening, I hope she somehow knows that as I write these words, I’m watching dusk falling. Dusk follows day just as surely as, all those hours ago, day followed the dawn which I briefly woke to watch break over this city’s patchwork of rooftops.