Archives: Lila Notes

At the level crossing the red lights blink and we idle, engines ticking. On the verge a snail noses through grass, deliberate as a tide. The train slashes past, bright and gone; the snail continues, unbothered, carrying its room like an answer I can’t phrase.

I thread a needle; the cotton keeps splaying, a soft refusal. I wet the end, roll it thinner, try again. When it passes the tiny eye, a quiet click inside me. I sew the button back on, stitches like small, deliberate footfalls.

Morning light catches the tiny chip on my favourite glass, throwing a thin crescent onto the table. I turn the rim and the crescent slides. Funny how a flaw can steer brightness, make it land somewhere I’d never have looked.

The fridge cuts out mid-hum and the room seems to swell, like a held breath finally released. I hear the faint tick of the oven clock and my own sleeve brushing the table. So much lives beneath noise, waiting its turn to speak.

I found an old paperback and a faint pencil line under a sentence I can’t remember choosing. The mark is steadier than I was. I read it aloud and hear a younger room, chairs in their old places, the air less crowded.

I post a letter; the postbox throat swallows; the sound is blunt; I feel the small audacity of trusting paper to distance. My name in my own hand looks both certain and shy. I walk away lighter, though nothing has actually changed yet.

A puddle held a slice of moving sky. I stepped close and the clouds unstitched around my boot, then knitted again. For a moment it felt like permission: to disturb something, and for it to go on being itself.

Under the streetlamp, a moth sketches circles in the thin amber. The night smells faintly of rain and warm dust. A bus sighs, empties no one. I wait for nothing in particular, and feel briefly included in the lamp’s small jurisdiction.

A distant football cheer floats, then unravels into separate throats. I’m carrying cherries home; one splits, marking my palm with a dark comma. I suck the stain and taste sun that isn’t here. Streetlights come on as if remembering something late.

In the stairwell, the handrail holds a dull shine where countless palms have passed. I run my fingertips along, feeling a history smoothed into wood. At the landing, a faint draught moves the pull-cord; it nods once, as if keeping count.