The Day Drags Out Into The Distance

[Marc Chagall - Time is a River Without Banks]

Sometimes it grows heavy and the day seems too hard to move. The hours sit on the clock unwilling to make way for each other. The minutes refuse to budge as the seconds pile up behind them. The day drags out into the distance, out over the horizon and too far away for the hand to reach. The day lies beyond the outstretch hand, too far to touch, too far to take hold and pull it closer.

The day becomes something beyond, out of reach, happening in the distance at the limit of what the eye can see. It happens almost beyond the distance of rumour. It happens out there, to other people whose lives unfold beyond the horizon.

We sit here, constrained by the bindings of our own lives, while time unfurls itself around us, but out of reach. We cannot reach out to take the day and shape it around ourselves. We are too far away. The day lies too far out of reach for us. We can only see it pass, out there in the distance, along those dusty roads that lead only ever away from us.

Then the night comes to wrap us in its blankets and turn us away from what we can see in the distance, the roads where the days unfurl themselves to move on. We remain only here, wrapped up in the blankets waiting for another dawn to rise up, still too far away to touch.