Still time

Three days with the covers pulled up to my chin, ears and eyes stuffed full of garbage, shutting out the possibility of naming my fear or leaving anything behind, generating limbo, creating quicksand, sinking sinking, floundering, then climbing out and finding a different kind of pause in the plump black shiny bodies of a pair of aubergines on the kitchen counters smiling as they wait for the the warmth of the oven, and before that the sharp pleasure of the knife slicing, and before that the cool stream of water sliding off their waxy skin, and before that the gentle awestruck caress of my hands.

MORNING AFTER

Heading outside and feeling the cool air mix with the warm sun against your cheek, you pause a moment to hear the door close behind you before carrying on. The streetscapes are silent this early on a Saturday—the morning's frosted dew still unstomped on the grass blades. You reach into your pocket and turn up the music in your ears before you walk away from the major arteries and into the residential area. Backroad by backroad, you carve a lightning-shaped path across town. People are just waking in their homes, but cats and dogs and birds mark the otherwise still scenery with sudden movements and with lazy movements. Some trees survive green and needly in this weather, but many are glorified twigs, reaching upward sans fioriture. And then you take a turn down an alley and walk naturally through a backyard whose owner you've never met. And there it is, as it has been every time before: in a small clearing at the border of four homes—homes shaped like they house kind families—there lives a small collection of rosebushes. It's unclear who watches over this patch, but the care is immaculately and invisibly performed. You bend to the flowers in an observant deference to the improbability that something so fragile and so red should survive in weather where your own breath is too foreign to go unchanged. Standing, you feel the second half of a vibration in your pocket and excitedly pluck out your phone, but it's only a message from a friend and you go back to imagining today as a healing experience.

Director’s notes on the airport scene

More urgency. More intensity. More desperation. More more more. This is the best love you’ve ever known, and you haven’t had enough, and you’re scared you’ll lose it. You need him to know that. You need to do something to make him hold the other end of the rope taut. You’re pulling and pulling so the line won’t go slack. Be greedy and ungraceful with your body here. You’re trying to drink him, memorise him, absorb him as if you could store this up for later, when you’re parched. Don’t contain the crying. Get to a point where you can see this might be the end and then let the dam break. Let all your fear and love spill out all at once, so when he says he loves you, don’t pull back and say I love you too in a way that looks anything like the polite exchanging of compliments. Say it like a howl at the moon, and then over and over like a prayer. Like someone trying to manifest a wish or save a life. With absolute fervour. Because you get what this will mean, you already feel the weight of the absence coming down on you, and the weight of the time it will last. You know exactly what is going to happen and how it will feel. So take all that weight of what is coming down the pike and put it onto your heart in that moment and try and use your body and his and those three-four words as a lever to try to hoist it. You’re trying to move a mountain. You’re trying to stop time. You’re trying to beat the facts off with all your might for just a minute longer. And then, in an instant, ricochet off him with all that force and go through the gate.