My Sandman

You turn the pages, admiring the impermanence of it all. No effort spared, yet these works will collect the dust just as the skirting boards will continue to grow their greyish coat long after you are gone. But it is right and good. And so you cling to it, feeling its solid weight as a gentle pressure, a comforting presence, as though it were alive. It will outlive you, of that there is no doubt.

How the silence of the mind reigns even in the midst of a low hum, squeaking trolley wheels, shuffles and zippers and page turns and stifled coughs. And birds chirping in between two buildings, their voices clanging back and forth against the concrete.

And time has stopped for you here. Enveloped in all the years you have lived and all the time that is yet to come, you are still, yet rushing, extending, being. You fold time around you like a cloak. For a minute. For eternity. Time is twisted on itself and you are where you should be: seated in a hardback chair in a corridor, greying carpet beneath your feet.