You lean out and touch the hard leather. There is a metallic button embedded in the surface, and you finger it slowly and deliberately, startled at the change in texture. You gaze into the dark hue and intuit it is like the sky. The moment of insight is without conception, because you don’t yet have a word for BLUE.

Time does us violence... Were I condemned to death, I should not be executed if, in the interval, time stood still... Time's violence rends the soul: by the rent eternity enters.
~Simone Weil

Were time to stand still, I would not have to endure the shock of separation, the unraveling of bonds.

The blossoms are coming in too early. It is still the dead of winter, and the tiny buds are foolhardy to take this risk. One cold snap, and the delicate white petals fall to the frostbitten grass.

And then I bump up against a hard, black surface, as impenetrable as a cut diamond. It glows dimly with a hundred thousand tiny points of light.

She is back in desert country. It is dry and the hills are copper-colored. She missed it, and now she starts walking through the scant brush. She feels a distinct and piercing pain in the toe and fears that she might have been bitten. Lifting her foot gently off the ground, she confirms it: a snake has buried its fangs in the flesh.

Dwelling in the great abode, an enormous cathedral of the purest ocean-blue water held in place by a dazzling matrix of arches made of diamond slabs. Only a hum like the inside of a seashell, only one opening in the far end, a gap in the whirring folds of blue.

She is back in her childhood home – a tiny, first-floor apartment in the trash-strewn projects. It is bare, with a mattress leaning against the wall of the living room. She walks over to the window. It looks out onto a small grassy patch where a large peacock is strolling and picking at the ground. Its tail is magnificently long but folded. She tries to call her mother over to the window and show her the peacock, but her mother does not believe her.