You open your eyes, and the day is new. No, it isn’t new, but fresh, crisp. Like fresh snow, or the hiss of opening a can of Coke. It was bottled up, sweet, but overly so, and it stings as you hold it up to your lips. The coldness burns you, as nectar pours down your throat. No, this day is not new; you’ve been here before.
You are home. Not a home made of brick and dust, something stronger than that. Something the wolf couldn’t blow away. Invisible strands that tie a life together, your life, built this place. The only thing wearing away at this home is time. Time, the villain of your childhood, the real bogeyman, the creature in the night stealing those moments away, leaving this moment, this very moment, the youngest, the freest you will ever be. Before you know it, those moments are sealed, locked away in a tin, and pushed to the back of your mind. But now you are here, you are back, and the honey is flowing.
But how did you get here? A song, a word, the moon sat at a certain angle; you can see someone up there, laying on their side. No, no, they’re stood next to you, that crescent gleaming in their eye, like a koi fish in a dark pond, sinking deep, deeper. You want to dive in. Or perhaps it was a lingering scent, floating off a faceless stranger on a street, a blur, now gone. No, before you ask, it wasn’t them. Or maybe it was, does it matter? You won’t see them again– they only exist in your memory. Maybe that person never existed anyways. They live only in your mind now, pieced together with gold filling the gaps you forgot, or chose to forget. Like Kintsugi.
Or maybe it isn’t a person you sense. No, you smell something else. Fresh cut grass, a bowl of fruit on the countertop, the sun casting rays through a half-drunk glass of bitty orange juice. Your dad always remembered the right sort to buy. He is outside again, tending the rosebushes, and you think, when did these days stop? You forget how tall he used to be. He always seemed big, able to fight whatever you might face. You used to think that when you held his hands, two small hands wrapped around his big paw. When was the last day you held them? Do you even remember? When did infinity pool down the plughole, those moments fading into an abyss, those hands forgetting your touch, leaving you sat in the cold, with wet hair trailing down your back with your chin resting on your knees. Now the garden is grey, the swing on the apple tree hangs by just one frayed rope now above wilted weeds. No longer tended by those callused hands, the roses are cut at the head, the trees stripped back to nothing. It is winter when you’re awake, leaves and spring aromas a lifetime away. That moment, those emotions, even further.
But now, just for now, you’re back. The sun is brighter now, and the sky is louder. Bugs and bees, a beetle lands on your shoulder. The silent audience to your childhood. I wonder where they are now? Their little lives, passed. A lunar moth’s adulthood only lasts a week, a week to live life, for the adulthood they so sorely craved, and it passes. They burn so bright in their beauty, their lives are over before they can ever be appreciated, exploding into a supernova. I wonder if they know how little their time is. I wonder if any creature does. It seems like no time to us, but we must seem even more fleeting to the mountains and trees towering above us. Everything is relative, everything limitlessly small. It is just the same for you as that moth. That life is gone now, that child outside, forever lost to time. As you see them now, the image is fading. Time, the only warrior to win every battle. Water on a cliff edge, battling away, eroding at the rock, until there is nothing left. Is there really nothing left of that life? You have floated back here now, but the can is emptying out, and the colours are fading. On the kitchen table now is a pile of letters: rent due, bills and advertisements, and a pile of dirty dishes on the side. That wasn’t there before. Or maybe it was. You’ll never know, everything is fading now.
Once you open that can, whatever it was which brought you to it, you can never open it again. Each time you visit, you bring a little bit of the now here, leeching away at the colours. You’re filling in the gaps now, it will never seem the same. The world does not end at the front door, dropping off into blankness. A world of filth and grime, just out of reach. You know that now. And nothing feels quite so right. The drink is never quite so sweet.
It is almost gone now. Reach for it, don’t let go. Once you let go, it is gone. It is already gone though, the only thing you can reach for is the last traces of the sublime; hands grasping on, no longer the hands of a child, but not like an adult either. A hedonistic ritual for a burning joy, a drug you can never taste again. But it is too late. It is forever contaminated by the now. Going. Going. Gone.
You are back on the street now. That stranger has passed, the scent a faint memory on your tongue. You aren’t quite sure it was ever there. Time always catches up, even in these little moments of infinity. And you keep walking, not quite sure where you went for those few moments. Something in your soul feels lighter now though, something has emptied out, and you don’t know what will ever fill it.
Alex Childerstone is an 18 year-old writer originally from Buckinghamshire studying English Literature and Creative Writing at Cardiff University. ‘Nectar’ is their first piece to be published, but he has intentions of a career in fiction writing. He is currently working on a collection of short prose from which this piece originates, as well as a longer novella within the folk-horror genre. When not writing, he spends his time surrounded by nature. A lot of their writing inspiration originates from this; he enjoys hiking and open-water swimming, as well as playing the guitar and travelling.