The slow season
26 March, 2008

A lonely, dusty street, sunlit from the high side, shadows pouring across the cracked pavement. No cars now, an empty respite in a noise-drenched world. Take the first step, feel the hardness beneath your feet, the air on your bare arms, colder in the pouring shadows. Push your hands forward, lift them to your face. Veins beneath your soft skin, blood pulsing in the blue lines. It all seems so clear: you are alive, today and always, in this quiet moment.

Footsteps echoing, but the roar of the big city will return. A slow season of sunlight, drifting from the plains, so far from here. Rising hills and broken lines, you can never see the horizon. Stop a moment. Ants lifting themselves from the cracks. Where are they coming from, where are they going? There is a world beneath the hardness, a city unknown. Always.

Touch the bag lying at your side, placing it back on your shoulder, brushing the imaginary dirt from its rough surface. You step on, leaving the ants behind. A single car, another walker. You didn’t think you were really alone. Not here.

Where are you going? It doesn’t matter now. There are endless cracked pavements to follow. A labyrinth, stretching forever.

Behind metal balconies, you could be watched. Eyes, seeing you pass, crossing the road and out of the shadows. You glow in the soft sunlight, a look of a freedom they will never know. Not now, anyway. They remain folded in the shadows, forever.

You avoid the main streets, where you know there will be noise. You walk away from the golden park, where the dappled birds perch high above resting bodies. Dogs scampering after playful balls, bouncing always out of time, catching the blissful moment that is permanently now. As you pass, you feel the swaying of the trees, the breeze through their leaves.

Soon this moment will be lost, as the sun tires beneath its early weight. The shadows are chasing you into a dusky corner, the people will return. Already the roar of the city is pushing through the broken lines, deafening the slow season for another day. Don’t go back to the echoing silence of your restless home. It would break the spell. The air in the pouring shadows is colder now, and you shiver slightly as you walk on. The veins have gone from your soft skin, but the blood flows on, today and always.