She tries to walk ‘slow slow’ like he taught her, connecting to the weight of her body as it rolls through her heel, urged forward along the edges, deep into the balls of the foot then radiating out into the toes, pushing off. There’s an almost devotional order, a security in the pattern of steps. She fights the ever-present desire to rush, to press herself insistently into the future, heart first. ‘Slow down’, he would scold, looking into her eyes. ‘Slower. It is only once you know the heaviness of the body’, he would say, ‘once you intuitively consider the placement of each foot, that you can flow’.
Despite these strictures, he walked the route languidly; appearing, to her, like a tributary tracing time to the sea. As she retraces the path in this heat, a bead of sweat slips down the valley of her back. She wants to slow down time, as if by lingering so long in the memory, she could conjure up the ghost. But he is already history. As if he’d walked the path so slowly that he passed into the unseeable.
That last time they walked together it was like a dance. ‘Slowly’, he kept saying, as he led her round. ‘Slower, slower’, standing so close that the urge to touch him swept her up like a flood. She understood then that the honeying of time was the sweetest gift he could give her. They stood still, drawing out those last few moments, his conspiratorial whispers pressing into her ears like hot tongues.
worththecominghome 