23rd September, 2006

Concentration etched between her brows, I watched the smoke weave in curling signets toward the distant sky, her fingers pale and relaxed around a disappearing cigarette. Johanna was rhapsodizing about some half-tangible figure, so careless and trivial, but her words floated past me and drowned themselves in the moving water at my back. Yielding to the earth's pull and my own lethargy, I lay parallel to the dry and cracking ground, staring upside down across the Thames' young twin. I listened to the river, steady and ceaseless as its motion was, never kept from that single ambition of carrying itself through to the sea. The quiet rage of its contents drifted into each of my ears, meeting at the center to fill me with its pure passion. I wondered with how much zeal that determined element would deign to carry me with it-- if I could slip in unnoticed, or if I would be dragged through its congealing, muddy bottom, and become part of the journey anonymously from then on. I cursed my own biology for its limitations, allowing me a glimpse of what purpose looked like and then mocking my admiration with the human incapacity for death. Her smoke billowed straight over me, and my mind was spinning.

Sed fugit, interea, fugit tempa. The river nursed Virgil, and they both haunted me as they passed, nature and the poet marching on their eternal way.

Johanna asked what I would have done in her position &c. My response was safe and uninspired, having paid only an absent mind to her ramblings, and because I knew she didn't care what I thought, anyhow. The wind began to pick up from the North, and the Sun retreated from that echoing ire into the West. Between dark strands of her rebellious, blowing hair was a scene of two sparrows escaping the cold base of a willow to their nest in the curtained branches above. Borrowing their instincts, she suggested our own departure.

We crossed the tree-flecked fields and came to the bridge: a dismal, steel structure stretched stiff and gracelessly over the river. Dry grass quivered at its forced roots, tiny gold flakes outshining man's metallic posts. We strode the length of steel and planks, up the asphalt hill and East toward the centre of town. A shortcut through the cemetery brought us to the small end of Queen Street, and face to face with the old funeral parlour; never had I seen those doors ajar, in all the frequent times I had stood and stared from the cemetery gates. I glanced halfway behind me, but I already knew why this was so: not one corpse in the church's yard had been placed there later than 1946.

The wind in the streets was less apparent, and the dull grey of the avenue's rooftops blended into our dusky sky, so that the mortar of man seemed to fall endlessly upward and mask the true colours of night. Johanna traipsed on, and I beside her, threading through the shufflers and beggars and loud thinkers to our understood destination ahead. The ragged air clawed at our eyes, pulling tears to the surface as our flesh cowered under icy skin.

Out of the cold and the damp, into a side-door plethora of fresh, foreign grinds and clink-clink-clinking mugs dribbling froth over their lips, we unloaded our shoulders in a free corner by the window. A youth of bright eyes and warm hue smiled from behind the till. He looked as if his pleasure lay in our service, and his satisfaction in a cinnamon-dusted apron--but I had no delusions. Essentially, he must wonder at the same futilities as I, and Johanna, and the frazzled, hoary man with his caffeine on the stool were suffered to admit incontrovertibly.

The sound of scraping chairs, cautious sipping, and spontaneous laughter bit and snapped at the condensed air, encircling us like wild beasts do criminals in a Roman amphitheater. I stared into my cup, its contents unflowing, opaque, and steamy; no satiation did the liquid bring, and I pondered again what set the river apart from this useless consumable mass. I felt like a mass, myself, rooted to the spindly seat and my gradually clearing vision. Johanna with her liquid words, the server with his liquid disposition and the old man with his liquid mind; we were all barrels of still water. We moved, but only within ourselves--not one of us was reaching the sea. The river, I figured, reigned superior to us all. It didn't even stop to gloat; for I knew even as I sat there, crouched inward and sedentary, that the reigning river had never ceased to flow.

--Isabel