and you can turn back no longer, no longer stand still

Strange days. The wait on the eve of momentous decisions suspends time, puts life in parentheses, allows even the nursing of a heavy cold at home. Good for reading, writing, musing, imagining future possibilities.

Yet impossible at the same time to avoid a certain sadness, a sense of loss at the prospect of other once imagined possibilities and cherished hopes being left behind - foundered, shipwrecked, scorched.

But maybe, as a dear friend has recently told me, the hardest thing will be when the moment of truth arrives and you will have to renounce the numbing security of old habits, the memory of places & people that were once part of your life, however briefly. For good and all.

In the meantime, this strange limbo. Neither good nor bad, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither warm nor cold. Just something in between, moving in slow motion - inexorably, though.

*       *       *

Above and below
The roll of days spread out like a cloth
Days engraved on everyone's forehead
Yesterday folding Tomorrow opening
Today like a horse without a rider
Today a drop of water falling into a lake
Today a white light above and below

A fan of days held in a virgin hand
A burning taper burning paper
And you can turn back no longer
No longer stand still
The words of poems curling among the ashes
Hieroglyphics of larger despairs than ours.


--David Gascoyne, 'No Solution' in Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994), p. 34.