Push

Shut in a box. A small cardboard box, pale silver and soft, like blotting paper with dapples of blue and pale orange subtle bumps on the surface. The box has a lid made of the same soft blotting paper card. It is neatly folded down and round, holding all the four corners snuggly solid. Slowly edging their way around the internal perimetre of the box, toes pressed softly up to the edge, tentative and tactile, wanting to push forward yet scared of meeting crocodiles. The toes explore, hoping to find a foothold, or a mouse hole, to loosen the grip of the four parallel walls. The nose feels warm, smells closeted, soft wooly air with a hint of apple juice and dust. Sharp fresh air, vibrant and cutting, freezing the inner hairs deep within their den is a long forgotten taste of memory lingering in the hidden innermost corners of the nostrils. Secreted away from the world, a hidden memory of time.

Time has no depth, no sight, no edges here. It is perpetual dusk, nothing visual, nothing certain just the dampened sound of the scuffle of the toes pressing doggedly at the cardboard walls. there is no before and no after, no certain and no uncertain, no will be and no was. All just hangs in the dampened space, a cube of air with unarguable boundaries, boundaries that don’t even fight, argue or insist, they just absorb forever.

Benign soft, lost suffocation.

Round, round, round they move. Hard against the straight cardboard edges. Perpetual motion, one after the other, after the other. Each dogged step feeling the toughened corners of the nail press and drag into the cardboard, a slight hint of a something warmer than cold sensation pushing on the underside of the nail, the soft, unarmed part of the toe, the gentle pack horse carrying the armour. There are no edges nor shapes to time. No linear maps which give comfort to those seeking a linear narrative, no definite answers expounding none linear time either, just existence. No beginning no end. Forever unguarded.

Burst out, thrown out, ejected into the tumult. Lights and shapes, a cascade of daggers shocking the eyes. There are eyes. That is new. Small round protuberances somewhere above the soul. Floating, drifting yet tethered to below, balloons buffeting their aloof and solitudinous vantage point. Wincing at the sudden influx of illumination and startled at the kaleidoscopic cacophony of brutish visions. The eyes stretched themselves round to explore, smoothly, almost caressing now that the sudden jolt had released the built up tension amassed through the indefinability of time. They creaked in submission of their reluctant expulsion into the world.