Fail #1 - self-indulgence from 9 months ago - cheer up!

It was out of the blue one morning that time stopped. The girl wasn’t afraid. She felt as if this had been coming for a long time. She knew that from now on things would no longer happen temporally. Everything that occurred would do so on the horizontal. This was the day the girl realised that she had no control over her fate.

Years later the girl awoke to a bright Tuesday morning. The wind flowed through the leaves of the horse-chestnut outside of her window with a silent grace, moving like an invisible tide. The girl was accustomed to living underwater by now and the gravity of the day no longer left her trembling.

The accident happened a little after three. The girl was buying flowers when she saw it. A spur-of-the-moment purchase. When she saw his bloodied face register nothing on the asphalt she understood. She sat at a bench and watched the paramedics carefully lift the man onto a canvas stretcher. She listened to the siren’s wail grow deeper as it raced away. She boarded a bus to the hospital.

They would not let her see him at first. She did not know his name after all. The family arrived. She sat in the reception area and gently caressed the stems of the lilies she had bought. They weren’t for her.

A day passed and she did not sleep. Time meant nothing to her anyway. A nurse must have told the family she was there because a little before sunset a man in his fifties approached her warily. The skin around his eyes was swollen and creased. It seemed that only pupils peered out at her. Black glass sunken into his puffy skin. His hair was thinning and ruffled. His hands were limp at his sides.

“You wanted to see our Graeme?”

She nodded. He dropped his head and sighed at his shoes.

“He’s stable but they say he may never use his legs again. He opened his eyes this morning but he can barely remember a thing of what happened.”

The girl nodded again. The man lifted his head a fraction to see her face. It was blank as a corpse. He could not read her nor glimpse any signs of life.

“Are you a friend of his?”

The girl shook her head fluidly.

“You don’t know him?”

She let her head fall slightly to the side. Holding his eyes with hers.

“These flowers are for him.” She said without intonation. Her voice unwavering and viscous.
The man was confused but not afraid nor angry. The girl was harmless but she seemed as if she were living on a different plane.

“You saw the accident?” He asked.

The girl barely moved.

“I felt as though I saw it over and over again.” She replied. “Everything slowed down and the birds stopped singing. He didn’t even scream.” She looked at the lilies and twirled them between her fingertips. The petals were beginning to discolour and curl at the edges. “These flowers I had just bought. They must be for him.” She said with a hint of sadness.

She must be in shock thought the man. The accident had shot her mind. He had no way of knowing she had always been that way. He stood and stared at her bowed head. Slowly it lifted and she raised the flowers to him. “Please lay these by his bedside,” she said, “they are meant to be with him”. The man shook his head. Something had come over him. Or rather something had enveloped him. Lifting him up. He was floating. “Bring them to him yourself” he said, then turned his back and led the way.

When the door opened to the room three faces lifted to stare at the two figures standing there. Six eyes were confused and unmoving. No one spoke. The girl brought the flowers to the man in the bed. He was young. Probably around the same age as she was. Now and again he winced in pain. The girl lay the lilies at his head. “Thank you,” said the man uneasily. He didn’t think he had ever seen her before but his thoughts were still thick and fuzzy. The girl turned to him and a smile crept across her face. Emotion flashed into her eyes as she stared at his. The young man felt something strike deep within him and his heart seemed to surge for a moment. He thought he saw her eyes slick with tears but in an instant they were dead and her smile seemed cheap and hollow.

The girl relaxed her face, turned her back and walked out of the hospital.

She wasn’t meant for the present. She had lost a dimension there. She seemed flat. A cartoon character on the TV screen. The past was where she dwelled in a kind of wholeness, granted her in retrospect by the imaginations of those that had known her once. She lived more in the fleeting memories of others than in her own reality. Her existence was lived out in vignettes, spread across the memories of all of those with whom she had shared a moment. The young man became a part of this web and she began to live partly within him. Her life did not burn but simper. It wouldn’t be hard to extinguish the flames. But as she lived through others she would continue even after her being came to an end. It would be years, and the deaths of many, before she fizzled out.