Time

Time stops…starts, it ticks, blows through every leaf, it shakes, runs, slows, it beats, vibrates.

It gets away from us, catches up with us. We arrive either too early or too late, and, there breezing past us without a backward glance, between each whirr of the dial, turn of the arm… it is there, completely still. Its arms touching each corner of space. It remains oblivious to our calculations, our names: eternal and untamed. It just carries on; drifting, floating, teasing us into the chase, then will o wisp like its gone. But as soon as it’s gone here it comes again: the hand turns and there, with a smile, the taunting begins once again and for every beat of our life, every second, minute, hour, day, month and year we grasp helplessly and watch as it runs like sand through our hands.

In Late October at some point in the morning my phone rang. It was a call I had been waiting for, in fact I’d been waiting for this call every day for over three years. Again, there was time; ever present at every event in life. Two minutes later, I put the phone down; two hours later I was sat on a bed in the hospital.

These measurements of time never tell our stories. They are there to just be marks on a line that never truly exist. What we feel, our own stories, they exist in the spaces between, in that space unmapped and unmeasured.

I am sat there with my mother an hour after hours passes unheralded. I want the time to speed up… no, I want it to slow down or maybe just stop, to cease even, or maybe just to freeze, allowing the inevitable. Somewhere else there is a family and I think about them, time has stopped there in the worst way imaginable. For them the only direction of travel they wish for must be backward, a winding back of the clock arm, for morning dawn to be sunken again beneath the eastern sea, yesterday’s night and day be remade anew. They needed more time; more time to love, to hold, to talk, to just be with them. There is a terrible cruelty in all of this.

My mother leaves and I am alone now. I lie there on the bed, I feel like a thief. I am the potential recipient of stolen goods, not money, gold or jewels - they are just cheap trinkets, parlour tricks...No, it is far more precious. Its worth is incalculable and it cannot be given to me without being taken from another. Yet still I lie here afraid, dreading the moment they come for me, cursing my cowardice, ashamed, it rises in me as bile and I run to the bathroom; then they come.

I am wheeled into the theatre from an ante room, covered faces reassure me, their voices gentle and calm but still a part of my mind is telling me to bolt, make a run for it, but who from, myself?

Then nothing.

Now I am in another room. There are other people in beds, all sorts of tubes and pipes protruding from them, big machines with numbers and lights bleep. I try to move. It is useless but I don’t feel too bad, maybe they didn’t do anything after all. I have no concept of time, just a sense that for a while I went missing - who from and where from I can’t answer but I know it was a realm, somewhere away, far away, I will revisit the place again over the coming days but I do not know that yet. A nurse stops and tells me it all seems to have gone very well so far; I have a new kidney. I don’t really process this information. Then my family come in, I am still high as a kite and my proclamation that I feel okay is met with a very sceptical look from my four year old daughter, a silent “have you taken a look at yourself?”. It proves to be the wisest of assessments.

For three days I exist in an unreal hinterland, ungoverned by our concept of time, as if untethered from it I go deeper and deeper, out of my mind on fentanyl I see the Styx, meet the boatman, on the other side of the river I see a blur, a structure in shadow, Hades. I feel as if I am astride two worlds. I am in the hospital ward but, at the same time, part of me is there no longer; my mind has wandered away and got lost. It is in that space, that place between the tick of seconds, and now it is dark there; no longer benign and beautiful. There is no dappled light between the trees, no swaying of tall grasses caught by the breeze. It is a shadow place, a land of constant dusk. I remain on the shore, the boatman doesn’t beckon me, he just stands there leant against his oar, the grey shingle beneath his boots. No one else comes, the boat remains tied, bobbing a little on the slate water.

I find my way back, to the ward, to the incessant beeping of the machine monitoring all the tubes that are also protruding from me. Hours wind their way into days. I am in and out for weeks. I move from a bed at hospital to one at home, slowly at first my strength starts to return and after several weeks I feel better than I have for a number of years now - five or six at least. No, maybe longer, yet the unsettled feeling remains. The line of my life has crossed over with another’s in ways I am still trying to understand. Someone unknown to me - apart from snippets of information I glean from computer screens and a hushed conversation I overheard before the operation. We will of course never meet but I feel bound to them now. The time stolen from them is now invested in me. It is my responsibility; no longer just mine to waste as I please; I must do something with it, use it for us. There is a real, working part inside me that does not belong to me. It has lived in someone else. It is rented, borrowed, robbed, a gift that was never intended to be mine.

Now a few months later here we all are; waiting. Time, so much time for many of us, in our houses, for some alone, for too many it has been time tragically cut short. Distant from each other, afraid for our loved ones, for each other, our communities - and yet maybe we’re not as distant as before. Because like time, distance isn’t really measurable, we try as humans to calculate this inseparable pair. If only to anchor our minds from our greatest fear, that vast unending unknown. We say how long? How far? When will we get there? When will it end? What time? And during this strange period in all our lives, we ask ourselves what should we do with this time? How should we use it?

Nothing.

We have the dynamic of the relationship wrong. We talk about 'doing' and 'using'. It's all wrong. It suggests we have control over something

It allows us to play, to live, to work, to love amongst its movements, its turns, its journeys. Tolerates our pet words, our numbers, our calendars. It even allows us to cling to its back but with just the slightest flick of a mighty tail, we are unsaddled and thrown from the ride.

I guess, for now, we just hold on.

I would like to dedicate this piece to the person who donated their kidney to me.

Thank you