“Cannonball” by Damien Rice… “There’s still a little bit of your ghost; your weakness. There’s still a little bit of your face I haven’t kissed…”

There’s been a good reason for my absence here. I’ve been wanting to write all this down for some time now but events conspired. I had writer’s block. No, wait. It would be more correct to say I had writer’s distraction, and by distraction I mean any number of things that would keep one from sitting at a desk and assembling life’s collages. And by getting caught up in that distraction, you remove the need to record the events, because you know full well that you’ll never forget them. Yes, there’s been a good reason for my absence here and the simplest way to describe it would be to imagine yourself setting out to document an illusion but instead getting lost in the reality it weaves for you. In years from now I may look back through the journal, stumbling upon a gap where July 2004 should have been and momentarily wonder why there were no entries during this month. A fraction of a second later a wave containing everything in that month would wash over me. The absence of words would suddenly speak volumes to me, in a million different tongues and remind me that detailing those events with a simple tool such as words would be merely scratching the surface of something deeply unforgettable.

To be honest, I did sort of have a case of writer’s block; lyrical breeze-blocks pinning all my thought-bubbles down, with nary a coherent introspective sentence in sight. Writer’s block is random. It comes about like an unsuspecting Mosquito bite at the birth of the perennial summer and helps us to forget about the bad weather we’d been experiencing our whole lives (you’d have to be British to truly understand this one), but I anticipated this mind-block. I saw it coming. How? Because it was planned, but not specifically planned. I didn’t wake up one morning and think to myself, “Hey, you know what I feel like? Yup, haven’t had one of those in a while.” It was planned with something else in mind, or rather, someone else in mind. So now we get to the bit where I elaborate on the distraction I had mentioned earlier. In the first week of June she moved in with me. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sooner or later you’ll find yourself at the gates of the most difficult morning. My most difficult morning for a long time had been that time I had to wake up for work with only 2 hours of sleep to my name. Maybe you know what that feels like. Sleeping for 2 hours is worse than sleeping for 1 hour, or even half an hour and you don’t need a scientist to explain why. There’s an acceptible number of minutes involved in rest. Anything less or more gives you the respective faculty of drowsiness and sluggishness.

But that was in the past. Now, my most difficult morning was that morning at the start of this month where I had to get into a car and drive her to the airport. Airports are both gloomy and joyous places at the same time, whether you’re a ticket-holder or not. Next time you’re at an airport, watch the people around you. What you’re seeing is change.

An airport is like a scaled down version of the world, and from that I will draw its comparison to life itself. This is because in life, the people you care about will inevitably have to leave and the only thing you can do is hope that they will return one day. They may go short distances to the shop on the corner or further, as far as a stall on the other side of the world and it’s only when you know they won’t return that you mourn. You cry in remembrance of the good times you shared; good times that could not ever be replicated again in the same way, with that person, in that same moment. Or, you will cry because you know that they are coming back one day, but can’t imagine how your heart will feasibly beat without them in the meantime.

On my most difficult morning, I woke up, rejuvenated only as far as 20 minutes could ever really throw me. I drove her to the airport, then went to my parents’ house, which was conveniently a comparatively short distance away. My room was about the same as I’d left it previously following a visit a few weeks ago, so I climbed into bed and slept till the mid-afternoon. After drifting in and out of several lucid installments, I decided to get into my car and drive back to my house, which sat on soil an hour and a half away. I drove on the same motorway I always used to, only this time it was more difficult having to drive with both my hands on the steering wheel. Driving used to feel so much easier when I was holding her hand, because it never felt like I was driving. I was travelling. We were just travellers plotting a course with our laughter and conversations like those dotted-lines you see on maps. With my cold hands on the wheel, a few sad songs played on the CD player. I wanted to get home, so I fought the urge to pull over on the hard shoulder for even just a moment. I continued driving even though everyone knows that it’s difficult to see when there’s salt in your eyes.

“Today’s the day! Today’s the day!” I remember hearing this phrase all throughout my life. It’s always delivered with great zeal and excitement and there’s a good reason why we’re glad for that day, “Today.” When we’re young, time goes Ariston and on and on. It seems neverending, but why did we think this way? It’s simple really, because as Einstein put it, everything is relative. A year seems like a long time to a baby because a year is a large portion of their life as they know it. Whereas to an old person, a year is just another fraction; a tiny piece of the great puzzle that is their life. In a contest to double one’s age, a baby would win hands down against someone already in primary school. So, why is time this way?

We’re constantly comparing things with ourselves whether we know it or not and not even time is able to evade our inspection. It never fails to get drawn in like light to a black hole from the immense force generated by our scrutiny (Well, nothing much can be done to create distance from our scrutiny anyway). You could count the pressure of this gigantic force from the numbers of devices strapped to the population’s wrists. So, time has no chance.

Time is abstract. It can be everywhere yet nowhere. But still, disconcerting as it is, abnegating its fleeting property is the worst thing one could do. Back then, a minute seemed like such a long time. When I was more impressionable, I never took much notice of time. It wasn’t seen as a luxury much like it became in the follow up to today. It was always something that was just there and never something that needed to be filled. Back then, time could have happily existed as an empty beaker and I wouldn’t have minded, but as more and more time passed me by, I came to realise that I should give it more consideration; that I should care about obtaining a more comfortable saddle to place over this turbulent and tidelike beast that refuses to be tamed; refuses to yield to man.

I used to find myself at times wishing the days would pass by even faster. I would wish for a special formula to spontaneously come about and be applied to me only, whereby every passing second of mine in the world was doubled and became the equivalent of two in everyone else’s world. Yes, this would make life move along more quickly. Of course, back then I wanted time to move along invariably because I wanted to be older. Didn’t we all at some stage? There’s always that abject view of adults having all the freedom in the world to do anything they wanted. This was what I wanted too at certain ages in my childhood (Little did I know that to keep your freedom and enjoy life, a part of your freedom must, more often than not, be sold away to a job). For the last couple of weeks especially, I’ve been very much like a child, handling time with my own adultised version of kid gloves. I wanted today to arrive so quickly. I found myself thinking again how awesome it would be if humans were designed to have a true autopilot function. We could shut ourselves down and set an alarm so that our mindless body could continue on its own the way it normally would otherwise and at some prescribed time later we’d awaken to the sound of our mind’s alarm, to enjoy that moment as though it had arrived in the space of a heart’s flutter.

There was a lot of time I was willing to give up. I would happily have gone to sleep one night two weeks ago and slept all the way, only to reawaken today. It’s tough to have to wait for an eagerly anticipated event to arrive. When I was young and watching the end credits of my favourite cartoons, all I could think about for that moment was how long I’d have to wait till the start of the next episode. But that day always came. The day when I no longer had to wait would always arrive. The moment I’d been waiting for always arrived. And the funny thing is, at that exact moment, it reinstates in my mind all the reasons why I once felt that I couldn’t wait. It reminds me that it was actually really good waiting for that moment to arrive, because it allowed me a juncture to have great conversations and learn many new things. The act of enduring that stretch of time gave me my own little special and personal stretch of time to think about how I’d appreciate that moment when it arrived; to enjoy it like nothing else in the world existed. Not even time.

I am so glad for today and for this stretch of time allocated to me, for my moment will finally arrive in about six and a half hours. I can’t hardly wait. And I do really mean that literally too.

I’m dead.

Wait.

No, I’m not. But I will be if I keep getting free coffee.