I am sad. Again. In bed with the covers pulled up to my chin, my eyes rest on the kitchen scales. It’s one of those classic ones, with a clock face. Only this one is better than a clock, because on this one time never passes. I can lie in bed all day and the big red pointer would still say it’s a few minutes before 4kgs.

There is construction work going on outside. A constant noise of random construction sounds, but nothing too intrusive. Inside (in my head inside) a million thoughts come and go in rapid succession.

I feel like one of the ships I saw from the airplane last week, flying back from Sardinia. While there, I had attempted to read a book on physics. Something about time passing faster high up on a mountain. The book was meant for laypeople, but I still didn’t quite get it. Until I looked down on those ships that didn’t move in a sea that didn’t move and I wondered if that was the point.

What I saw reminded me of the opening lines of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves:

“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.”

(Incidentally, the whole opening scene of The Waves is one of the best pieces of prose I ever read)

The wrinkled cloth I was looking at had ships scattered around on it like abandoned toys. While on the plane the cabin crew was doing a hasty round of trash collection before landing, down there on the cloth nothing moved. The ships and the sea were on pause. Their stillness seemed like a performance. As if they would carry on as usual the second they were out of our sight. But then I wondered about the sailors. They wouldn’t be frozen in time would they? Wouldn’t their time be passing just like mine? Maybe I still didn’t get this physics thing after all.

Back here in bed, I step outside of myself for a moment and I see a sad woman underneath wrinkled sheets, lying perfectly still, staring at her kitchen scales. On pause. Except inside, inside the thoughts are coming and going and loud like sailors. Working round the clock. Darting from here to there. Never stopping. Never on pause.

Sometimes I wish I was a musician. A songwriter, more specifically. To feel something and then to put it in a song. To be rid of it and then to have it for always in a song. It seems so simple, if I could do it. I wonder if that is what poets are: songwriters without a talent for music. No offence. I’m not a songwriter and I’m not a poet. I don’t have the talent for music or the patience for poetry. I just have to feel and wait for it to pass. And then whatever thoughts I had will be gone forever.

I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them, it’s still a few minutes before 4kgs.

About this post: