Time - Fakiru Week 2014

Light has a funny way of altering time.

Some days it stabs, bright and vivacious and makes Fakir think truly hard about his life. Makes him think about what he failed to do and what he managed to create.

The dawn is so full of life that it makes Fakir bitter, want to wither and die, but the yawning dusk makes him choke on his words and want to live all the more.

On other days the light rolls into his room and filters his breath like tiny waves, all eddies and slow rolls and breaking against the solids - a knee against a desk, a burnt finger on the kettle, a second of panic when filling in a form - a forgetful moment, crashing down on him.

He doesn't like forgetting he doesn't want to forget but it all slips away from him, the sand in the hourglass between his feet crumble finer and fall faster and it can't- it shouldn't. He's only forty and it shouldn't.

Fakir feels painfully human those days.

Fakir feels terribly alone.

He creaks into bed and feels the soft white linen and feels her tender embrace and her pristine down. She's left him. For so many years she has left him here.

He never could save her in the end, and perhaps that's why he keeps living, to remember that golden smile and those blue eyes and hair of evening sunlight.

One day she is human and the next she is a duck and each time he keeps her closer for longer.

Until one day it stops.

Fakir looks at the clock behind him.

It is seven thirty-three in the evening, outside on the veranda with a mug of tea or maybe black coffee and he has waited in the winter air since an hour before. He is 42.

Days pass and time slows and it hurts to know that it's over, he can't recall, and he'll never get to say goodbye.

Fakir almost, but doesn't, lose hope.

He wants to see her again. He hopes he can.

He will live and hope.

-

For Fakir, thirty years and a hospital bed will be a long time to wait. 11,000 days until then.

And after that he will have only four.