the lost rose
Flash, flicker and you’re back an inordinate amount of years. Back to a time when paper copies of images could be ordered from the local chemist and took weeks to arrive instead of an instantaneous information overload of gratification right here and right now. Photographically capturing a freezeframe fleckle and waiting a while for its results holds a certain beauty. We could have captured the wrong incident; photographed someone else’s garden, caught the lady at the front with both eyes closed…
So to transpose these effects to the passage of lifetime, I have made concerted efforts to make the time pass slowly. To savour a second instead of missing a minute. I take care not to imbibe any time-speeding molecules. I have stopped everything that denotes the passage of time in this crumbling house; all the clocks are paused with hands pointing to different digits, some of which are poised at a nonexistant time. It does not matter - they will be correct two times a day anyway. Discarded watches lay in the hall - for at some time in the afternoon I remember basking in the tiny triangle of sunshine lighting and littering the darkness. A reflected, mutated glossy glassed shape, tracing a passing in the passageway.
One day this light will turn from burning orange to clear. The glass will be replaced in glistening shells, to continue keeping out draughts and protecting from rain, until the next effects when the cracks begin to appear. Perhaps in another home, at another time. Perhaps with different inhabitants along their different paths.
If you cast your mind to places behind, we sat, as in a faded square photograph, cross-legged on warm concrete slabs, with chunks of chalk in our hands. Lines of shadows and lights were drawn across the brown, black and red rectangles, in hastily marked grey, mapping the journey the shadow and light took through the day. Every line needing to be overmarked twice; chalkstone left overnight turns solid and unwieldy. This time I’ll try and mark the silhouette straight - i’ll grind the chalk down to a fine paste and daub the locations in fingerpaint on slabs with more accuracy than a shaking hand ever could. We will map the journey daily, retracing the circles of the continuous and the contours of correlation, until the area is awash with brightness. Dip your hands into the cold chalkwater and draw with me now. Run a finger along the smooth and thick damp texture of setting clays until the sunlight beckons, leaving a baked bait of cracked and curledged paint plastered behind…
And if you would pop your head around the door once in a while (whilst literally unable, but…?) you might paint the room with a lushly rosed tint of “are” instead of “could have”. A rose tinted with only a hint of warm; left to sun itself in the afternoons of memory, sprinkled with raining pine needles and a tiny dewdrop, then sealed safely in a clear box. Away from eyes which could cause its delicate petals to wilt.
And what has become of this rose? Lost. Unfindable. Maybe, during the passage of time, they took the rosebushes out of the ground, to cover over with decking, grasses and gravels. Things more in keeping with the times.
One day I will find another rose with many more layers of imperfect arcs, and curl up between the perfumed chords of the repetitive roseflower circle. It would never replace yours. But sometimes we see something so beautifully fragile, that it must be preserved in memory.
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