It is

the notion of time relived.

Sitting in a room with an evanescent computer screen.
Binders of research scattered open across the nearby bed.
Pieces of black matt board strewn about and a long silver
ruler placed inbetween. Images waiting-to-be-framed.
The colours of the Duvet cover underneath.
Crimson. Orange and rust. The Persian rug misaligned
across a hardwood floor.

A view through the window. Late afternoon light.
The lake. White sky. White walls, white drapes.
The cadmium orange of a painting on the wall
above the bed beside the window. The top left
cornered crease-of-the-canvas.
Everything just so.

The black and crimson. Orange and silver.
The white: sky and walls. The view outside
juxtaposed against the arrangement of spaceandtime within.
The breathing in and out of it. And the feeling of
being lifted outside (of self). As if to look down
from above.

It is one of t h o s e moments.

Clarity and disorientation allatonce. As if time stops.
Or, more likely, stepping outside of it and standing still
while watching everything else rush past at infinte speed.

I know this moment.
Have seen it before.
These details.
Known before it actually unfolds.
In a dream.

Dreams of minutia.

Moments like these happpen rarely. But when they do, there
is a sense of something about-to-change. Or perhaps
something profound-about-to-be.
Something life-altering.

Instead of a thousand and one nights,
it is the eternity of time-standing-still.

"Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for it
a small, bird-sized fondness; but there was probably
no other sound in the dizzying silence except for the
equally timeless noise of crickets. The glib thought
I am in the year eighteen hundred and something ceased to be a few approximate words
and deepened into reality. I felt as the dead feel.
I felt myself to be an abstract observer of the world:
an indefinite fear imbued with knowledge that is the
greatest clarity of metaphysics. No, I did not believe
I had made my way upstream on the presumptive
waters of Time. Rather, I suspected myself to be in
possession of the reticent or absent meaning of the
inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I succceed in defining this figment of my imagination." (JLB, 1936)