Edison globes illuminate the off white walls of your room, creating lucid shadows that dance amongst orbs of amber. The fan spins deftly overhead, blending in with the perpetual buzz of outside traffic.
But despite all of this, things are still.
It’s 6:15 pm and it’s not silent but it’s quiet enough. Oceans rise and fall inside your soul throughout the day, but by nightfall they’re calm. These are the patterns you move through; rising, swelling, becoming, growing, shrinking, falling,
becoming.
This morning you were sitting at a cafe with a cold cup of tea thinking about how you write so often about this moment it’s become a cliche. And maybe other people won’t understand but you always will. You’ll always see the hidden poetry swimming in the depths of that forgotten cup, the romance of being so absorbed in life that you forget to take a sip. And you always break the promise that you won’t miss your next drink.
Now you’re looking out your window connecting the city lights like man-made constellations, and you’re not quite sure when this space transformed from something foreign to something that feels like your own. Maybe it was when you hung your favourite artwork on the walls. Maybe it was the first time you cried on the shower floor. Most likely, it was the first time you brewed a cup of chamomile only to fall asleep with it never having touched your lips.
When was the last time something touched your lips.
At night you go back and forth between creating poetry that always rhymes and drawings that make sense less than half the time. No matter what you write it always ends up rhyming, as though the entire history of the world occurred just so you could join those two words. Life seems too coincidental for it to have happened a different way;
the synchronicity of two divine players
and a game of chess that can only end one way.
The fan has stopped spinning overhead but the ocean inside is becoming restless again. You know stillness is ephemeral and evaporates the second you reach for it. And yet you still took the batteries out of your clock. Now it appears as though all of time has stopped.
But even though the hands are locked in a trance, the shadows on your wall are engaged in eternal dance. And to their light, cold cup of tea in hand, the first words of the night emerge;
Things come and they pass
And oceans rise and they fall
To the silent ticking
Of the clock
On the wall
But no matter the size of the waves
Big or small
You’ll always be the same person
Through it all
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