Seven seventeen fourteen degrees overcast

Don’t tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing. I know precisely what I’m doing. I am grabbing the moment, seizing it with both hands, twisting and strangling it until it lies limp, cold and unmoving in my arms.

These few words are the deliberate, conscious act of taking an inward breath, whilst I hold myself all stillness beneath the watery surface. This is what I’m about, where I’m at. Very much of very little. Overwhelmed by the otherness, the other. Except. Except that seconds crawl into minutes, which stretch into hours and last into days and I’m still here, no longer peddling but still conscientiously pedalling. Backwards, forwards, anywhichways. Walking just to stay in one place. Running to stand still. Not just metaphorically either.

So I whisper my mantra, holding it like a pill under my tongue for safekeeping, because it will make me better and eradicate the sickness, the fever. I whisper my mantra, hoping that the hush can overpower the din of the constant of the rushing of the ceaseless, of the hordes and their constancy, dialled up to eleven. I whisper my mantra in grasps and clutches and hold hold hold. Yes, I’ve still got this single breath in my lungs. It’s mine, all mine. Not exhaled yet. Not exhaled.

I count these moments all in and I count them all out again. Totting up, tallying, crossing them off. Chiselling them in the stone, notches in the wood. And I wonder, because wondering is what I do when the moment allows. I wonder what happened to make me such a person who lives for the precious days, lazy days, when we unravel together, listening to the dull roar of the world weaving back and forth some five decaying floors below.