Wrapped in plastic...

Yesterday on the train returning from London, I saw a long white bundle lying in the ditch next to the train lines.  It looked like it was wrapped in twisted plastic or fabric, or that the material had bound itself tighter around the matter inside as it rolled down the weed thick slope.  The train was moving fast and I was tired, so it could have just been a row of white plastic bags from weeding the line, or illegally dumped rubbish...

But for a while there, I thought I was looking at Laura Palmer...

My heart rate picked up and my mouth went dry.  I craned my head to look back at the fast receding bundle glowing unbelievably bright in the pre-storm sunshine, my brain tripping over itself with thoughts of the emergency brake and policemen.

As the train turned the corner, a hill budding between me and that bundle, inside my mind - inside that vast book lined library of everything I've ever learnt and forgotten, every image I've ever seen and every experience I've ever had – the logical Twistedwitch snorted and turned the page of her newspaper, staring over the top of her glasses at the Twistedwitch of Imagination as she climbs on a bookcase to stare nervously out of the window.

“You know it's just rubbish bags...”

“What?”

“It's not a body.”

“You don't know that!  It could be a murdered prostitute or a love triangle gone wrong!”

“Do they ever go right?”

“What?”

Closing her paper, Logic sighs and stares at Imagination until she climbs down from her wobbling perch.  Imagination walks backwards down the library towards Logic, her eyes on that window, her feet coming closer to tangling with every reluctant step.

“It wasn't a body, it was too visible a place to leave it and forensic science is too good to chance a murder victim being found.”

“Maybe...”

Logic opens her paper again and goes back to reading the psychological dissemination of the dead poet.  Without looking she nods towards one of the other windows.

“Go look out of the window, we're going past a wood.”

Imagination runs through the clouds of glowing dust motes and scrambles up the books piled against the wall to press her face against the window.

“Oh my God!  There's something moving beneath the trees!  It's wolves!  No, it's the wild hunt!  Wait...it's zombies!”

Logic shakes her head and for one moment feels sorry for the lone deer that raised it's head at the wrong time.  She rustles the paper and turns the page.  Behind her the Twistedwitch of Creativity steps out from the shadows, a heavy book in hand.  Her eyes dart feverishly from Logic to Imagination and the hand holding the book raises.  It's a heavy book and it should give Imagination a few hours of unfettered wildness.

This is how my mind works.  This is why I never get anything done.  Damn my over-thinking mind.

In between days...

When I woke up this morning the light was grey with rain, the room softened by it, lulled by the patter of drops echoing in the double glazed window sills.  In bed, wrapped in the duvet, snuggled by husband and cat, this morning felt so familiar and I tried to snag the drifting trail of this sensation.  The cool, pale air, the warmth, the sense of waking naturally without an alarm...

I still can't place it, whether it just feels like a thousand other autumn or late-spring days, full of breezes, dampness and cloud coloured light.  Maybe it just reminds me of itself, my brain mis-firing and creating a circuit straight into memory...

What-ever it was, it was delicate contentment.  A moment of peace before thought, when you truly were only in-the-moment, in that space between sleep and coherence.

The weather outside is much the same now, the clouds bringing the roof of the world closer, the colour of a mourning dove's wing.  It's raining still, small drops shaking the spring green of the trees outside the window.  Enough to dapple the ground but too little to make the self-conscious brolly-holders feel justified.

I long to be beneath the duvet, chasing after that moment of familiarity, the darkness streaked with grey light, one foot out of the side of the bed feeling the coolness of the room outside the duvet cocoon.

That in between-ness calls to me, calls to all of us; the twilight between day and night, the dim empty halls between rooms, the space between life and death, the darkness beneath the trees on a bright summer day...

What if you were neither one thing or another?  What if you were always between states, places, time?  What if you were as intangible as smoke, the pale grey of a mourning dove's wings...

Maybe you are?

Maybe I am too.