He didn't recognize the countryside.

The dark woods stood still either side of the path.  In the very last light of day, the trees, though in full leaf, reminded him of the heart of winter, as if lonely, bare branches reached to the sky.  A chill fell with the night, intensifying the vision.  He felt it in some part of himself that he could not reach. The cold was almost tangible, turning forest and path into an alien landscape.  Summer's warmth, things familiar to him were lost in the long ago; this moment a time that had existed forever.      

His feet knew the path. At a pace that left him breathless, they carried him along a track he could not see.  When a gate appeared before him, formed out of the gloom, he put his hand on it, half expecting to grasp only mist and fog. Solid wood met his hand but would not yield to his pushing.  He was a big man, tall and broad and he only paused a minute before easily climbing over.

There was a house in the distance and off to the right, almost lost amongst the trees, was another house.  Though a light shone from it, he knew it was empty. He turned his attention to the house in the distance and was moving forward instantly.  Night closed around him, swallowed the gate behind him.  But the house before him drew no nearer and a cloud of doubt settled over him.  He slowed, tried to calculate the way back.  When he turned to examine the path behind him, blackness greeted him. There was no path, no gate, no light from the house near the gate.  A small flutter in his chest threatened to take wing as full-blown panic.  Seeking to control the growing sense of inevitability, he thought he might stay just where he was until he received some sort of sign but at the same time he realized a sign would not be given.

Return was not possible.  Something barred the way.   The knowledge that his sons, his house, all his friends and family waited back along the road he'd just travelled didn't help.  He couldn't make his feet move and he shrank from that utter darkness behind him as if knowing that an inconceivable fate waited there. 

He pressed on.  Distance could not be measured for there were no reference points for either it or for speed.  Something was happening, a weightlessness, a forgetting of limbs, of the mechanics of the brisk walk.  Heart and lungs pumped one message, the urgency of arriving.  It became a flood that rushed forward, washed him up to a door that sprang out of the earth, yet gave the appearance that it had always been there.  The thunder of his heart, the roaring in his ears passed out of him and away into the dark.  His eyes couldn't make out anything except the massive white door before him and when he raised his right hand the door knob, a flat, gold colour, appeared just out of its reach.

When he touched it, he was falling with a speed and suddenness that left most of him behind.

He saw his garden, tranquil in the late summer sun.  It could have been any summer day but he knew this was sometime recent, just as he knew this was exactly as he'd seen it last.  The umbrella was up over the patio table.  A bottle of red wine and two glasses stood on it.  This puzzled him.  Their mother was gone.  It was just the boys - young men, really -- and he.  Neither of them drank wine and he would have preferred a white at this time of day, yet there stood two glasses filled nearly to the top with red wine.

Four could sit very comfortably around the table but he saw only two chairs.  He thought to look for the other two that were always there when he realised that one chair was not empty.  A woman sat there.  Though her face was turned from him, watching something unseen in the distance, he knew she was aware of every move he made.  He could see her plainly, yet could make out nothing about her.  Her hair seemed blonde, dark and grey all at the same time, her demeanour laughing, gentle and brooding all at once. Foreboding washed over him, sighing like the sea, but he knew he had to approach her.

The chair was under him, the wine directly in front of him.  She turned her face to him and in her eyes he saw the stars and the distances behind them.  The sea swelled in her hair that fell tangled to her lap.  Hands the age of old, misty hills rested on the stem of the wine glass before her. He was naked under her gaze, vulnerable, no aspect of him hidden from her.

The sound of the sea pounding the shore was clearly audible.  He knew his home was far from any great body of water but had ceased to wonder, had stopped trying to discover the logic of his situation.  He knew that if he glanced over his shoulder, he wouldn't see his garden.  A wide expanse of water lay behind him and no one had returned from this sailing to speak of any shore beyond.

Are you ready?

No, it is not my time.

Will you drink the wine with me?

No, it is not my time.  I don't know how I got here!

You are not the first to tell me that nor will you be the last.  You are here now.  Drink the wine. Go into the water.

Her request was a command, gently made, the words forming somewhere deep inside him.  From the same place came a deep sadness that he couldn't see his boys; that everything he knew lay behind him.  More than time and distance separated him from the mundane but just for a second, he knew he could return.  He could put off the moment of crossing this sea.  Just a little more time in his garden, with his friends.

Surely everyone who faced her thought the same; a moment longer for those things that should have been done. Then, light caught the wine in the glass and he was acutely aware of the brownish red at the centre of the liquid. The colour of old blood, it drew him in, down through its darkness.  A faint sighing, like the nearby, unfamiliar sea, breathed through him and around him. It was an alien but peaceful hymn and thoughts of his wife, the boys' mother, dead all these years, enveloped him. In that moment, it struck him: all of it was but one second, existing in the same breath, every second of his existence happening at once. From birth to this sunlit garden, he found he could examine all the minutiae of his life.

He could go back.  He could step into any moment.  As quickly as the notion occurred to him, he found his attention focused on one particular time.  At first, there was only coolness, the smell of earth and grass until he became aware of a small group of people.  He didn't know them at first but their state of agitation was unmistakeable, their distress almost visible on the warm summer air.  Then he recognised them -- his two sons and their girlfriends. They seemed to hover over a spot on the lawn forever, or perhaps it was only a blink of an eye before his elder son, was on his knees, administering the kiss of life and then, going through the familiar motions of trying to get a reluctant heart to beat once again.

And he *was* reluctant!  He couldn't leave this place/time where this new perspective, was only a beginning.  He looked at his birth and saw his death and now looked with understanding upon the end of himself.  A wave of sadness passed over him because he knew it was impossible to share this knowledge with his sons and equally impossible to comfort their friends. The emotion bore him up and away but with what little strength he still had for things of that world, he let the sadness go.  The love he felt for his boys was the gold sunlight that radiated everything he saw and everything he finally left behind.

 She sat there still, like living stone.  His garden was gone.  The wine shook a little in its glass and in the silence there was only the breathing of the sea.   Everything that had been, that was, that was yet to be, waited.  In the glass before him was Her, himself, his sons, his wife, who he now saw had never left him.  His hand closed upon the glass as a mist rose from nowhere, obscuring the woman before him.  He thought perhaps she was one with the fog that became the rolling sea that also melted into grey skies. By himself at a table that shimmered out of existence as he drank the wine, he was not alone.  He was part of the sea, a tall, white-topped wave that fell back into the body of the heaving vastness.  Then he knew what it was to kiss the shore.
 

Like what you've read? Have suggestions or constructive criticism? Email me! tlyr (at) tlyr.co.uk