TD 1
The first weeks of lock down and the silence that
wrapped around them felt like a fresh fall of snow. You could hear an ant flex its muscles deep below a drift of pure powdered white. It seems like a taboo to say it but there are strains of that silence I already feel a certain nostalgia for. The crystallization of seconds into epiphanies, days that stretched like long calendar months and months that evaporated after drawing their first breath. Even at this short distance, March already seems like a faraway time, another era, something I am imagining and not remembering. I knew this time was ending even as it was happening. I felt beatified by the oddness of everything. In the stillness, things appeared to be liberated from their prescribed functions. Roads dreamed of how it would feel to never have a car ride on their backs again. What might have become of them if they had never been tarred and macked? They lay there stretched and mostly untyred and for the first time in their lives. Traffic lights pined for eye drops to cure their meaningless blinking, imagining what they might do if they could see the world through one constant green light. Empty buses dreamed of taking early retirement and writing that book they had conjured, in their heaving bombardier sides, each rush hour morning in the time before. Escalators and elevators swapped exist strategies of what to do in this post foot fall world. Who knew that the silence would be such a fecund place? That dreams, like frog spawn, could hatch in the most unexpected corners of our ruptured routines. And now the thaw is here. That first snow has turned to slush. Commerce comes like a sheriff on horseback, a holstered shadow on the horizon of our reverie, corralling us all away from dreaming. Forks put to one side notions of ever becoming spoons, of scooping and souping and not just being again what they have always been, the thing that holds steady the objects of the knife’s slicing desire. And with the melting comes the first shock of forgotten pavement beneath the ice. The slip. The hard fall. Woken too soon. A dream interrupted. Denied completion. The city is bruised. I want to hold her close. My darlin’ Dublin, hollowed out like a seashell I want to put you to my ear now and hear you roar! Reverse the charges, talk all night, will you take me back? Can we begin again? 22