Five Days In A Moment

The apartment is amazing -- cool grey pebble-floored bathroom, with a showerhead like a rainstorm and a tub that lets me sink under the water to my neck (which I do, every evening, for ages). Tiny kitchen -- table, chairs. And, up a narrow and precarious ladder-like flight of steps, a bed flat on the floor, that takes up half a room. Ceiling all inward-pushing A-frame slopes (and I hit my head against them more than once, just in that first hour, opening bags, becoming familiar). An enormous and complicated television, long low sofa, two ornate and arty chairs. There is a lamp, on the floor beside the sofa, the size and shape of a goose -- a goose that has within it a warmly glowing egg of light -- and another, beside the bed, shaped like a duck. When I've changed some of my clothes, brushed my teeth, I walk outside -- winding a scarf several times around my throat, pulling soft fingerless gloves up over my wrists against the cold -- and study the door, the street. Grey stone steps, tall red door. The museum across the street, huge and white. Fix these in my mind, and then go have breakfast.

I think sometimes I only really enjoy being outside, walking for hours, when it is cold enough to make my eyes water. I walk, and walk, with no real objective, not really knowing how, eventually, to get back. There is a small lake, or an enormous pond, almost entirely frozen over. People, coat-bundled, walking across and around it. Two parents on ice skates, pulling a small child behind them on a sled. And the ice nearest the shore -- and the small pocket of unfrozen water there -- is overrun with ducks and swans. They are unphased by people, will walk right up to you to take bits of bread (which I don't have) from your fingers. They wander by, hardly paying any attention, near enough to touch.

There is a fine, almost invisible line, between manageably tired and non-functionally exhausted, which I never see until I've crossed it and turn to look back behind me. I notice, suddenly, that I cannot keep my eyes in focus, but by then of course it's much too late, and now -- in this tiny city with its knotted winding streets crammed full of letters and so many syllables, crunching in my mouth -- I am halfway lost. Keep finding the two main streets I know are within perhaps two blocks of the tall red doors of my apartment building, but cannot make that knowledge -- or my map -- relate to anything I actually see in front of me while I walk. Until, all at once, a bar on a streetcorner looks familiar, and a handful of halfway-dizzy steps later, there I am.

And there is 12 hours of sleep, sleep like something heavy and dense, something unfolding to take up all the space available and then take more. A day lost to haziness, and it doesn't matter; when I finally go out into the cold, the world is still there, waiting. I wander through walls of canvas, and later sit and talk to strangers while drinking coffee, and at night the hot bath melts everything away entirely, and I think...this must be how people feel, always (or very nearly) -- like floating, like something not weighted down and desperate with a huge and nameless thing.

I go and ride a horse -- 17 years since the last time I rode one -- and the day is cold in the damp way that seeps into your bones and stays; two hours and my legs are numb but I don't notice until we're back at the stable and I am once more standing on the frozen ground (and my hands smell of leather and warm soft hair and speed, still, hours later).

The water in the thermal pools is salt-rich and warm, or sometimes hot, and wraps around my skin like arms; it is like floating in a giant sea of tears, but cut away from the sadness of their cause. Washing away the world. And night comes, the sky fades away into the mist, and it is all unfocused drifting in a long warm embrace, everything softened, and the sting of salt on my lips. And on the long bus ride back to town, I fall asleep, thick velvet; everything gentle, gentle, and quiet.