A straw-sized tunnel, a whole galaxy long, leads to a room. Inside a light blinks on – you’d never see it from here – and fingers too small to fathom turn an hourglass. Drip, plunk, plink: sandy drops of rain start to pour through the pinched centre.
Forty-five minutes has begun.
Here, a bumblebee has just taken off from a floppy runway of orange petals. It needs to find some other pollen-laden flower before the time’s up: forty-five minutes is all it takes to snuff the buzz right out of that little thing, apparently. For those fingers up there are never distracted, you see. They won’t let grains of sand sit still for anyone. Not even the heavy bumble doing so well in the first two days of Autumn.
🐈 ⚡
Cats react faster than snakes. I didn’t know that.
Their whole world is practically in slow motion compared to ours.
I just presumed a snake would win because they’re limbless, terrain-speeding villains, you know. Fanged and magnificent.
And if a dragonfly jutters into view, I now realise we see them for years of their life. Relatively speaking.
I wonder then, with all this time running slow and fast, can we measure our days more simply? By counting how many times the wind fluttered your skirt, for instance? I'm sure someone will be: sat in a room two corridors along from the Hourglass Turner.
Around a year ago I began to write in earnest.
I edited poetry for a competition on the loo: THIS IS DEDICATION, I believed. I would write in the snatches of “free time” as a “full time mother” — whilst potatoes boiled on the hob; in the thirty minutes before Pick-Up. I’d write in the complete silence of early morning, then suddenly with a backdrop of tinny sound effects from toy speakers and my son adding his name to my essays every time he lost interest in Air Search and Rescue.
There is so much I expected to write that I didn’t.
I had these “groundbreaking ideas” but found it challenging to research evidence to support my “points”. It became a chore. As so many new passions seem to. So I rewound:
I would like to write.
That's all.
There is no point I want to make.
And ever since, I can stare at a blank page or blinking cursor, as someone measures my day in BPM (blanks/blinks per minute) and know the words will arrive. It is a lovely thing.
What can happen in a year is bewildering.
Remember that dragonfly I mentioned earlier? It erupted out of the hedgerow, its eyes bright in the sun, and I thought: How shiny. Thanks for that. I’ll write about you later.
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