So Bright

It happens like this. At some point on any given day, at seemingly random intervals and with no discernible pattern, I will notice something slip. This is the only indicator, and it usually comes so close to the start of the episode that it affords me little or no time to brace myself. A finger fumbles on a keyboard or a mug drops or someone stumbles. At first I imagined that this started it, that a small wrongness opened a door for a greater one, but now I believe that it is not causation but correlation, the seeping of the wrong time into my world - the first soft wavelets of the change unsettling one or a few things before the full effect has time to spread out and engulf everything. Soon colours alter and fade, stone-washed and pastel, and no sounds come.

A man stood on the curb ahead of me drops the mobile phone into which he was talking. The phone is safely cradled in his hand, but without the pause that seems in one's mind to precede an event or the segue that indicates cause, it’s dropping to the floor, as if hand and phone moved at different speeds. About half-way down, the object will accelerate unnaturally. The man’s expressions, his reactions, will pick up pace; now I have about ten seconds to find somewhere safe before the rest of the world is shifting so fast that I can’t move. People’s faces are a good guide, because they are changed by the sudden rapidity of movement; blinks and glances build a blurred cataract over the eyeball and a purple stain above and below, as the lids move too fast; the teeth of a person sat in conversation seem to become liquid, leaving trails. It is not that their time has become fast, but that mine has become slow; I solidify and become brittle, and they all carry on as before. I drop out of their world, unable to keep up.

An episode can last seconds or days; I think they may be becoming longer and one day I shall be imprisoned forever, though I cannot say. I have seen others, sometimes, trapped like me. Their eyes are so bright in a world of muted shades. Someone held for the first time can be destroyed so easily, stuck in the wrong path, confused, panicked, trampled by a stampede of commuters, or ripped through by paper airplanes and tennis balls that move like the inexorable bullets of bathos. You have to find a place devoid of people as quickly as you can, and it is the hardest thing you can ever do because you are running to save your life and being held back ever more with each passing moment, until you freeze, suspended in mid-air as you fall down a man-hole, jammed in a disused doorway with your trailing leg left dangling dangerously in the street. No one can see you more than five seconds in, because you fade from their sight like a myth, unless they were staring at you when it began. Then you are locked for them like a bronze sculpture in a square, and they cannot understand why you are rigid, why you cannot move or talk, or why no-one else can see you there.

The first time I saw another it was a young woman; she was crouching beside a small tree in a park where I was lying under a bench. Her eyes, so bright, were fixed on me, feeding me with hope, and we watched each other until it passed. As it receded I rose from my hiding place and ran, my limbs gradually building up speed, my body flooding with relief and with the freedom of my sudden fluidity. She seemed as though she might flee but she stayed ever so still, almost as if she were still trapped, until I wrapped my arms around her in disbelief and she yielded to me.

We talked for days, barely sleeping or eating. She had first felt time go wrong as a small child; a vase fell and her mother, running from another room, could not see her by the time she arrived. The police nearly trampled her while they searched the house. She was better than me at hiding, more used to it. She told me that there were many others trapped, but that she had never before seen two people begin and end a phase in synch. It seems romantic and absurd but it felt like a sign and I wanted to hold her to me and never relinquish that grasp because she was mine and we could always hide together.

Her eyes, so bright, transfixed me as she told me of her loneliness, of her fears, of the way that she used her slow time in her mind. She talked of the unparalleled joy and the incredulity she had felt as she watched me crawl under that bench opposite her tree, and of how she had locked her gaze upon me so as to see whether we were released together, and then I heard a door slam too loud and her eyes glazed with buzzing motion and her teeth began to drip and cling to each other and her hands blurred into a solid arc, and I tried to scream but it was too late and my mouth would not move and no sound would come. I saw her face recoil too fast with the sudden realisation that she was alone as before, and I knew that my frozen mask, unable to respond, must have made her feel sick, as I did. She left and I could not cry for three days, because for three days I could not do anything except replay in my mind those eyes, so bright, clouding over.