Time Is A Construct

The movement of the sun across the sky (the movement of the earth around the sun). The change of the seasons. The measurement of time from a fixed point of longitude chosen by the greatest astronomers of their day (a construct in itself: 24 hours in two 12 hour segments; a.m., p.m.; night and day) for their own geographical convenience.

None of that mattered when her body was telling her to be awake while everyone else was sleeping. Well, not everyone, obviously. The people in Australia probably weren’t sleeping. It was still too early for them to sleep. Like it was too late for her to be awake.

The time on the clock kept moving forward, faster than she wanted it to go. Hours were whizzing by in a matter of seconds. Or so it seemed.

She tried different tricks to get to sleep: hot milk and honey; a slug of rum; playing gentle music; lying in the dark thinking about waterfalls and meadows. None of it worked.

Sleep was the best part of the day for her. It always had been. He had laughed at her for her ability to sleep. She had tried to explain that it was delicious. The gentle decline from consciousness to repose, like a movement in a concerto – drawing you from one moment to another without being aware of it.

He hadn’t got it.

That’s why this insomnia was so cruel. Her body was physically tired, but her mind kept racing on. And now, it was almost as though she was afraid to go to sleep, because then the night would be upon her and the morning would follow soon after. Too soon. Especially at the rate the hands on the clock were carving out their passage through the seconds, minutes and hours.

She kept the lamp on by the bed. There was no-one else here to disturb. No-one to sigh, or tut, or pull the covers over his head in mock annoyance (was it mock annoyance?) while she sat reading.

She sat and let her thoughts chase each other, round and round in circles. She listened to the planes drifting over, on their way to the airport, coming in to land. Circles and circles, round and round. That’s what life was all about. Circles. Non-linear. Like you find a job that you're good at, but it doesn't pay the bills, so you take a job that you could do hog-tied and watch your ambitions shrivel, like a virgin spinster who has never been touched and no longer expects it, becoming instead a prune where once she was a cherry. Circles and circles, round and round, on and on. Like you find the person you were meant to be with, that you fit with like spoons in a drawer, and then he has to go and die.

Men had lain in that bed beside her, since he’d upped and died and she’d upped and left. They had lain rigid and still, listening to the planes going overhead, but listening also to her near silent crying. Not knowing if they were supposed to put their arms around her, ask her what was wrong, or if that would be an invasion of her privacy. They probably didn't even want to put their arms around her and ask her what was wrong. That wasn’t what they were there for. Neither she nor they pretended that.

She sat there and remembered, drifting deeper along that channel of grief that was the central river of her existence now, that was submerged deep below her surface and whose source was in a different city. Though she had not known that at the time, when she was there. The knowledge of its source came later, when sorrow and weeping had begun to swell the stream that was the beginning of grief.

She sat in that bed – not their bed. This bed had never been their bed. Once he was gone, there had been no point in staying there. She had left and come home. She didn’t want to stay in a place that was all about him.

In her mind, though, it was their bed. She was sitting on the edge of her side of the bed and looking at the pillow where his head used to lie. The place where he had laid his head and slept and where she knew he would never lay his head again. She sat and stared, inwardly grieving as the Dublin traffic pounded the street below their bedroom window, and he was not yet dead. But nor was he there, living, breathing, sleeping in their bed.

She had not been able to move or think, she had only been able to gaze blankly at that hollow in the pillow. He was gone already and she had to keep on living.

That night, she had not been able to sleep. She could not bear to lie down in that bed on her own. It had been dawn when, dreamlike, she had moved into the spare room and lain fully clothed on the single bed, sleeping with her eyes open. She had stared at the white wall, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, thinking of nothing but how he was not there. Numb and simultaneously raging, her grief a secret molten layer waiting to erupt. She had lain there, curled on her side, keeping her eyes wide open. The double bed in the room next door had seemed miles away from her, on a different planet. His narrow body, plumbed with tubes and pipes and wired to bleeping beeping machines in a narrow hospital bed, had been a monochrome image in her mind's eye. His narrow body would never lie warm and relaxed beside her again and she had to go on living.

The shrillness of the telephone's ring had woken her later that morning. The hospital might just as well have told her she was a widow already. Instead the voice told her that a bed had been put into the side ward her husband was on - she could stay with him until the end.

Instinct had told her she should thank the stranger on the other end of the phone, even though she was far off feeling gratitude. She had wanted to scream, "My husband is dying" but she knew there would be no-one to hear her. No-one would listen or want to hear that news.

She had been told once, by her mother, that love was all you needed. But love hadn’t kept her safe, hadn’t protected her from harm. Love of a country had ripped him away from her. Love of a cause had taken him out that night, and with his nimble slender fingers he had put wires together, bedding them in explosive, setting the bomb, setting the trap.

She had gone that day from their Dublin flat up north to the hospital in the border town where he had been taken. She had sat with him until the end, while yet another bed she could not sleep in had stood useless on that side ward. Time had stretched on but, at the same time, it had foreshortened – giving the correct impression of form and proportion.

And when it was over, when he was finally gone, and that unholy war had claimed another victim and made her a widow, she had come home.

So long ago now, and yet only like yesterday.

Just like the start of this night that was now turning back into day.

The measurement of time meant nothing to her now.

© J R Hargreaves 2006