A scent of twilight
I always know when it's time to stop walking. When it's almost twilight, but not quite, on that faint green borderline between birdsong and sleep, I stop and look. At something, anything, as intently as I can. It's a habit that has lived in my bones all my life. An affinity for the liminal blue yonder between all certainties of life and death. Something pulls my feet along and then almost on the beat, I'm under a tree against the fading light and homecoming of the birds.
Here yellowing leaves mark the sky, a jagged outline fighting for darkness in defiance of the light. A family of sparrows surviving in a sea of screeching mynahs. Flying foxes gliding away on crimson trails. The death of the sun is a carefully crafted ritual, pieced together in strange verse. A twig shivers in anticipation of the long night. And there like a domino, a distant flutter of wings in the canopy rises into a stormy crescendo.
Eons away in deep time, breathless highlands of the Pamirs are alive at dusk. Wild horses rush down rocky slopes, bursting with a primal fire and wind in their dark hooves. Clouds of dust rise and melt away into the looming blue. They shall vanish into cold nights of stars and desolation, leaving only whispers in their wake. I cannot stop. This is not my twilight.
But where, in this infinite string of blue hours do I belong? In the company of Camel herders in Samarkand? With the fur trappers of Yukon? Cotton pluckers of Guinea with their nameless lives etched into their tired, glistening black shells? Or perhaps in Vidisha, when the potter's daughter returns home with her long, wet hair draped over her bare back, anticipating a poetic elegy seven centuries in the future? Her poet shall get crushed under the wheels of merciless time, perhaps dreaming of a blue hour entangled in her bosom till his last gasp.
I try and stop, aching for a scent of these hours that tease themselves into existence and then quietly disappear into the thin, jagged line. A cheshire smile. That strange liminal world where I try and stop, stumbling and grappling at anything to stop my feet. I fail. I fall. The birds have long gone silent. The treeline now awaits the night. These hours glide away on crimson wings. The scent has gone. I keep walking in a trance.
Down in the marshes, a Jacana looks up between the reeds at the gold in the west. The night calls, its leathery feet fit right into the innumerable imprints that have vanished into the marshlands of the night. It wades through the dark water, deeper into the murky blue, until all that remains is a sound and a scent. A memory of possible pasts.
And I watch, from a distance beyond the shivering twig and the jagged cliffs. A fragrance lingers on, blue and cold on my skin. Night falls.