Caught in a moment…

So I’m in Wales for the first time in a while, months in fact and a strange and sad few months they have been.

Those months have made me realise that no matter how hard you try or the plans that you make, life is random - fine in a single instant and a shitty mess the very next moment. No point in pondering on it, you just have to accept it and get on.

I used to think that I could make things happen, control my life, make it run to a plan. What a grand and confident fool I was. It isn’t us that are in charge, it is fate or karma or chance or whatever you want to call it, but certainly it isn’t us that controls the next moment – if anything at all really can and does control it. Perhaps the next moment is like a wind - stirred by the wings of a single imagined butterfly - that grows into a terrible storm to come crashing in on an unexpecting life to snatch it away in the moment.

I’m lying in my bed in the roof of our scruffy little cottage in Wales. It’s hot, really hot. The end of a long sunny day and the heat still hangs in the air. The bedroom smells dusty with bottled up heat and it’s quiet, so very, very quiet. Even the electricity wires outside my window are still. No sound from them as they lie in the heat tonight. I’m hoping for a breeze and perhaps a storm to cool the air, rain thrumming on the roof, the wires humming with thunder and lightning. I don’t know if it will come. I can no more control the weather than I can control the next moment of my life.

Something screams in the empty space of the distance. An animal of some kind meeting its end on the end of a predator’s talons, or the sound of an unsuspecting soul passing quickly and suddenly in a dark and unexpectedly short night. Simply a moment for the screamer as the screamer’s time runs out. I shiver, not with cold because it is still hot, the rain not coming, the breeze not stirring the long grass outside, the wires remaining silent. Perhaps it was that butterfly that screamed, the long imagined silent scream of a final flutter caught in a moment.

How I wish those wires would sing.

It’s still half-light outside, a glow in the distance in the place where the sea lies beneath the deep red cloud and the lighthouse stands. The full dark won’t come until later when the moment of those bleak early hours brings me some sleep and darkness I hope.

Bring me that next moment.

If I’m lucky there will be a next moment and that moment will be a good one and the one after that, and after that, and after that until all those moments add up into a long and good life. But there’s no guarantee. Fate may have already started me on some other journey. Karma may have decided it’s time for me to pay my dues. Chance may be about to roll me an unlucky number. That butterfly may have flapped her last and final flap of those delicate wings. We just can’t know can we?

Where’s that rain? I need it to come and gently pitter-patter me to sleep.