December mornings had me touching the striped, wet glass of the balcony. Smeared with the precipitate of nights, the view is half-lie, half-truth, and some imagination. Amidst the white dreariness, one could, however, see bright teal leaves stirring, resembling a soluble painting.
We exist in two states. It is not unusual to wonder, then, what is inherent to being, movement or stillness? I am aware that I cannot sit still for long. Most life forms are governed by such urges. Is stillness then an acquired nature or a lost one? What is fundamental to the universe? Is silence the birth of movement, or its death?
Perhaps, it’s impossible to know. Then again one should always start with the obvious, that which lies right in front. Perhaps, I could enquire the tea cup on the shelf or the myriad objects lying all around, subservient subordinates just waiting for orders. Such vast eternities coalesced in their bodies, after eons and eons of waiting. One must wonder what that can do to a body. It spits red iron. It becomes terribly wise and indefinitely quiet. I take the tea cup to my ear and hold close the distinct sound of emptiness, a delightful moan across the trough of time.
We are surrounded by infinite stillness. Motion is not as common as we think, just easier to observe. The naked tree is a monument. The branch only flutters on command. The bed lays and lays and the mats snore and snore. The shell on the white shelf remains stubbornly closed, never revealing its startling seas. Everything stays until interfered with. The room floats heavy with inertia.
It is through this mass of fat stillness that I move. The body moves through the thick air, through the eternal slumber of day, observing each thing, each particle, each ray of light, deterred only by its own movements. It is in this expanse that I stretch limb after limb, part the toes, spread my taut skin across layers and layers of air. It is in this acquired inertness that the body twirls. The body rotates around its feet and hums. The entire body an ear, the entire body a long joy.
It is in absolute rest that this dance is born, slowness stirring like jelly into masses and sculptures. The amassed breath, the sedimented strains of age, the echo of the flesh’s visceral being, all stirs into a silent shape, a leaf twirling in time, stagnant to the naked eye but moving, growing, growing into a shape, a fluid shape, arched in both sorrow and joy. The body grows, fingers fluttering in the air, expanding into a timeless dance of collective being and neither movement nor stillness is separate from the other.
The author, 26, is a poet and writer. She was awarded the Reuel International Prize 2017 for poetry and was a finalist for the RL Poetry Award, 2018.
