One Irrelevant Minute
The flowers are brighter and their scent stronger. Or their petals are dull and rotten.
Not all inspiration comes from beautiful vistas or romantic nights ringing with laughter and wearing pretty dresses. Some come from places of sorrow and heartbreak, scrapped from between life's dirty toes. But I see it as my job (for some reason) to take that filth and turn it into something meaningful.
I have been working on a new novel this year, but I have a feeling that I'm going to put those twenty-odd pages in a drawer and continue with this instead. Let me know what you think in the subscribers chat. Where do you think this story is going? Is it worthy of the time and effort needed to become a novel?
It only takes a moment to change a life. One irrelevant minute can spring you into another world where the flowers are brighter and their scent stronger. Or their petals are dull and rotten. A single bar of music, a flicking frame of film, a line of literature, a touch of passion - these are the turntables that send us marching down a new path. And it's impossible to anticipate these fleeting moments. Each time anticipation crawls into the equation - no matter how subtle, if you embrace it or ignore it - these subtle moments lose their power to overcome life's inertia.
And we should be thankful for it. Otherwise, we'd spend our life as a pair of forgotten socks in a washing machine. One unsuspected moment is all it takes to end the cycle, shattering monotony with a brush of a hand or a finger poke.
If you're lucky, you might get a couple in your lifetime. For the unlucky - a handful will come your way, knocking you off kilter each time you haul yourself back to your feet.
Last month, as summer beckoned me into shorts and linen shirts, I was hit by my first.
Sunlight forced me into a squint as I leafed through the first couple of pages of A Picture of Dorian Grey. I'd picked up the sticky, well-worn copy second-hand from a bookshop at the edge of town. A place you can't believe affords the rent. Somehow, it's been around since I was born. Regular visits award me a nod at the door from the decrepit owner, but nothing more because we have nothing to talk about.
"Have you finished Gatsby yet?" He asked every day for four weeks after I picked up a copy.
"Haven't started."
On the fifth week, he stopped asking, and he's resorted to a firm nod since. He doesn't know I only read when I'm on the move. Maybe if I ever told him, he'd start asking questions again. Like why? And then I'd have to think because I hardly know myself. It's got something to do with the captivity or the motion. Or, more likely, the eyes around that I want to impress.
That's always been one of my worst habits - zigging when everyone else is zagging. And never in a way that makes sense. I'd never read in a library or relax in a spa. Reading on a busy platform, surrounded by bowed heads and glowing screens though, that's right up my street.
I'd managed to lull myself into the rhythm of Oscar Wild - one of the only classic writers I can stand - when I felt a push on my shoulder. It wasn't a very hard push, more like a poke: not firm enough to flood my blood with adrenaline but enough to lift my gaze and crease my brow.
"Sorry," she said, smiling shyly.
"No worries," I replied automatically, smiled, and returned my gaze to page twenty-two. But waiting for me wasn't page twenty-two. Pink nail varnish and dry knuckles took its place. Delicately pinched between index finger and thumb, a note written on an old receipt.
"My train's about to leave. Do what you want with it," She said and left, placing the Sky Lounge receipt in the fold between pages twenty-two and three. A puff of warm air brushed my cheeks as I snapped it shut. I looked up, tracing her between the crowd flowing from the arrived train. An ordinary pair of Levi jeans hugged her waist, a white T-shirt rippled in the breeze, and clean white trainers plotted their way between the flood of people. Her brown hair turned ginger where the late afternoon sunlight landed. She was my first moment. I knew then as I held my book in my clammy palm and boarded my train, heading in the opposite direction. Suddenly, it felt like the wrong one.
The note is next to me now, as it has been since she placed it in the folds of chapter two. As it happens, I've not turned another page. Instead, I keep retracing the sentence neatly underlined by that ninety-six euro and fifty cent receipt. That is one of the great secrets of life - to cure the soul of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. By no means am I the most veracious reader. Gatsby is still waiting for me on the dock of his Rhode Island Manson after five years. It's hard to get all that way when you only read when you're on the move. Unless, of course, I become a nomad. And I never claim to be a person of great intellect either. Average is what I am, plain and simple. But I've taken to dissecting that one line like a therapist listening to a recurring dream. Fate has handed me a sign on a plate, and to leave it unfinished would be disrespectful to my host. There are some things you aren't meant to realise before a designated time. Over the last week, going to and from work clutching my increasingly beaten copy of Dorian Gray, I've begun to understand how fabricated I have been until this point. I was - still am - an ugly portrait of influences I've picked up over the years. In the background: a pale hue of my parents, with their moralism, restraint, and selflessness. In the foreground, a hodge-podge of fluorescent green and yellows hurriedly applied as I fought to paint my own picture as I grew old enough to despise what my parents were. Then, the main object awkwardly fills the middle of the frame, a grotesque attempt at confidence, charm and intellect.
And then, as quickly as that introspection comes, it fades, replaced by pink nails and high-waisted Levi's. When I'mwaiting on the platform, tired from a day of emails and meetings, I hear her voice.
"Do what you want with it." It says, and I look up from page twenty-two. But no one is there, just a crowd of bowed heads. Then I look down again and read those heralded lines again, hoping their repetition might clear my confusion. Because that is what I have been; that is what reading one line over and over, and hearing voices does to you. It's what clinging to a book you aren't reading does. I'm lost, adrift, pushed into the middle of the sea by a finger poke of a finger.
Rain falls in heavy vertical lines on my journey home, snaking diagonally along the train windows. It's the type of rain that spoils everything within its reach.
Crowds hover at the station exit, gauging the downpour, hunting for lighter batches in the sky, under which they might run home without drenching their summer suits and dresses. I tuck Dorian Gray under my jacket and lean forward as I run to protect him. After five minutes, I'm out of breath and drenched, but home. A trail of water follows me up the stairs, and I can taste the floral fragrance from my hair wax at the corner of my mouth. Dorian is soaked too. Each page melts into one another, and the ink from the receipt has run and split. The number scribbled on the back is a black river, curling between spoiled white banks. It's eligible.
"Hello," she said, distracted. In the background, the sound of something sizzling in a pan. "Hello!" she repeats. Then, cutting above the sizzling and the drops of water dripping from my nose onto the laminate floor at my feet, a scream. Two screams.
"Mum! Mum!" They shout, and I hang up. My stomach turns, and suddenly, my headaches with sleepless nights. Morality, restraint, selflessness, I think, turning my phone between my fingers. Outside, the rain continues; umbrellas drift along the street, as though they're sticks in current. Confidence, charm, intellect, I think, turning my phone again.
I leave my sodden clothes in a pile by the washing machine and warm myself in the shower.
"Do what you want with it." plays on a loop in my head, growing louder and more leading each time I remember the screams. My phone buzzes next to the sink as I dry myself and shave three days worth of stubble from my face. Raindrops drum on my window, and the smell of garlic drifts into my apartment from the downstairs neighbour. My head aches again, stabbing me in the temple. Another buzz. Damp fingertips leave drops on the glass as I type in my password, and the screen reveals the message. There's an address. Then, sitting above that, a date and time.
Love, Luke
I enjoy the haphazardness of the flashbacks in this story!