The broken fabric of moments
Posted on | October 3, 2007 |
We’re a dozen cars back from the stoplight and we’re waiting. They’re up ahead, in the moving van. I’m following after with a car load of dogs, their tongues hot and wet, breath clouding the glass. I have the windows down. Its evening and the shadows are long across the pharmacy and the auto parts shop, stark rectangles of concrete and illuminated signs. Up where we’re supposed to turn, lights are flashing, red and white. My heart leaps up, an unquiet fish in my chest.
We wait. I feel my head pulsing. I’ve had no time to decompress; to let my shoulders fall, while sipping a glass of water on the back lawn, or sit down at the keyboard for the daily comfort of words. No choice today but to be right here, waiting, with the yellow lines on the road, and the certain crumpled metal up ahead.
There are more ambulances now, and a fire truck. On a stretcher, someone. As I realize this, my eyes are suddenly glassy. I imagine my baby boy there and in a heartbeat, my resentment for any time it’s taking melts away. I whisper out into the twilight air, fragrant with exhaust and dog breath and doughnuts being made across the street at the bakery.
I’m caught there, waiting for the light to change or for someone to direct me around the crumpled cars, folded like paper into each other. Briefly, our seconds overlap. My moments become snarled like a burr in the weft these moments here. These moments that will define for someone how things will always be different.
And then the light does change, and a man with a reflective vest and two-day stubble waves me on, just as another ambulance pulls into the space where my care idled; the air invariably still warm with exhaust; the asphalt bearing the heat of my tires. I go.
But for them the moment continues. It stretches out like taffy or silly putty, until it has become unbelievably slender. For me, time suddenly bleeds bleed forwards again. Like a river or an avalanche temporarily parting around a boulder before merging again. Along the side of the road on the sidewalk, girls on the rugby team at the University run in packs of three and four. Their legs are bare and golden in the sun, ponytails bouncing up and down. In the sky an airplane prepares for landing, the setting sun turning its metal belly into a sliver of fire in the pale evening sky.
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11 Responses to “The broken fabric of moments”
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October 3rd, 2007 @ 9:47 pm
Always so good with sensory imagery.
So glad you missed the moment, were not a part of the rubble. So strange to come away from it all, trembling, the adrenaline of observation.
October 3rd, 2007 @ 9:49 pm
Always so good with sensory imagery.
So glad you missed the moment, were not a part of the rubble. So strange to come away from it all, trembling, the adrenaline of observation.
October 4th, 2007 @ 6:39 am
wow.
October 4th, 2007 @ 9:05 am
I appreciate your gift for words, your decision to see things differently in that situation. It inspires me. Thank you.
October 4th, 2007 @ 11:47 am
Your words reach across the ocean to this fading day, spinning within me, filling the noise of the car driving by with far away meaning, so close to me.
October 4th, 2007 @ 1:02 pm
Wow. That was vivid. My heart was in my throat - I am so happy that it ended as an observation and not something wrong with one of your loved ones. Well, actually, that sounded shitty in a weird way because it is SOMEONE’S loved ones. But there is that strange relief when it is not YOURS, isn’t there?
October 4th, 2007 @ 1:04 pm
I am always impressed by the way you can make the ordinary, every-day things so powerful.
October 4th, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
so getting linked for this, you are.
October 5th, 2007 @ 10:14 pm
Extraordinary writing of something that can happen to any of us - to be near to a tragedy, but an observer, and the thoughts tumble in our heads - ‘what if’. Very fine writing.
w.
October 6th, 2007 @ 12:45 am
Mark and I were in an accident years ago and we both remember the same moment vividly: when the truck hit us from behind all the change in Mark’s ashtray sprang into the air and then just stopped, holding in midair for what seemed like minutes rather than the split second it must have been. It felt like we could have swept our arms through the air and gathered them all up in the silent time they hung there. Then the noise of the crash, the rush of the impact and the rattling of change falling everywhere came crashing into us, forcing us out of that surreal moment in time.
When everything stopped, we turned to each other and said, “Whoa.”
Hope all the souls in that crash were OK.
October 6th, 2007 @ 3:11 pm
Ok… Sitting here, killing time, I found myself going from random blog, to random blog. Some things touched me, but always I was able to tell the dog to stop barking. Even in the best of posts I was able to read, see AND hear my daughters words and questions to me.
Then yours appeared before me and I lost all sense of everything.
the ringing telephone, the growing-frustration-filled daughter…
You are a beautiful writer, and i do not mean that in the way the word beautiful is overused as a trendy filler for kindness, i mean it sincerely. Beautiful.