being here and being able

saturday, the 30th of July

The feeling was as though the blood at the tops of her legs was on spin-cycle. She stopped just before apartments, where the parking space flattened out the tarmac, and the white-blindness came on. Blank flakes beyond which the world escaped its pictures. Her own hands appeared to be insubstantial. And yet she recognised this feeling as being alive, her blood being rediverted along all the routes that kept her alive, operating on such a precise level of efficiency that she experienced the dips in availability fully and visceral. The warmth of the sun on her skin came justly, into her fingers even, and it was welcome. She seemed to be running a slight temperature these days that cooperated pleasingly with the outside weather conditions. Her heartbeat sped up to a count of 5 for each in breath and decreased markedly to 2 for every out. It was like running a tap through a sensitive hose and being able to monitor all manner of readjustments the intelligent liquid within the casing was making. Yes, indeed it was, she thought, it was like being able to do both these things simultaneously. The pounding behind her ears, where her neck became her skull bucket, would soon subside, swoosh into a resting frequency, she would think it had stopped. The general faintness would pass into a lightness of being and she could set off down the dry-cleaning street feeling happier and happier at being here and being able. There is a trick of letting the optimum time evolve so that she can walk the length of the apartments in the sunshine having had the more insistently mechanical preparations of her body dissipate prior to turning left into the oncoming at full stride. No counting, just breathe through it.