The Child In Time

Driving to work this morning, a man's voice on the radio.

‘It does not seem to me that we understand the laws governing the return of the past. But I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like. And the longer I think about it, the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.’

WG Sebald (whose punctuation was no doubt far better than mine and to whom I can only apologise)

Perhaps it is us who are the ghosts.
Perhaps, in the eyes of the dead, we are the ones who appear insubstantial and thin.

I often think of Georgina as a shadow, as someone who slipped away.
But, perhaps, it is me who is the shade.

Jessica and I are left immersed in time, to soak in time until we are saturated with it.
Until time has filled up all the spaces within us. Between our cells, inside our veins.

Time pulls Jessica upwards like a weed, she grows taller, her limbs thicken, she learns to speak and walk, the circuitry inside her mind fires sparks.
Time has started to tug me downwards, wrinkling my face, wilting my body, dulling my mind.

Time. It will not leave either of us in peace.

We are impermanent.
In a state of flux.
Until the end of our days.
Time exerts forces upon us that we are powerless to stop.

But not Georgina.
Georgina is static, untouched.
Not for her the flickering parade of images that time makes of the living.

She will always remain the same. Permanent.

Time rested its hand gently upon her head and then sent her away.

The strange accelerations, twists and convulsions of time are not for her.
She will never sit waiting for the clock to nudge forward another hour.
She will never watch her body grow, fade and die.
She will never wake disorientated from dreams of childhood.

She is a different entity. She has fallen out of time.
Perhaps that is why she feels so very far away from me?