There are times when the day crystallises around a moment, a moment when time becomes solid, a permanence in an otherwise fleeting world. It is as if time carves certain moments from the transient, giving them permanent form in the mind. Times I will always turn to when I remember… especially when I remember her.
She was long ago and it was spring, spring on the turn into summer. I was young, of course, but she was not. All I had was still unformed, verging on the possible. She was stumbling towards that time where life becomes a time of less looking forward and more about looking back.
She said, once, and only half-joking that she ‘wanted to recapture my youth,’ she smiled as she turned to me, running a finger down my chest. ’…and you are that youth I’ve captured.’ Then she kissed down the path her finger had traced, as I turned and lay back letting her hand, her tongue, her mouth capture all my youth.
She had a life, of course, husband and children, even though the children were mostly grown, and – at times – I felt myself replacing both husband and children in her otherwise slowly-emptying life. As she said, some other time, as we lay together down by the river: ‘My husband left me years ago. The trouble is he never actually got around to moving out. We live our lives like two trains on parallel tracks, sometimes passing each other on our routes to different places… occasional sometimes even meeting for a few moments in a station or train yard, but other than that….’ She turned away to lie on her back and watch the clouds, and that was the moment that crystallised, became an unforgettable memory, as I realised that we would both be one of those passing clouds in each other’s lives, there and then gone.
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