Where does the present go when it slips through us?
This morning, like many mornings, I woke unsure of what had happened to the night. Time had turned into wet paper, dissolving at the corners. There was the ceiling. The cough. The slow agony of daylight trickling in. I lay there, not quite afraid, not quite awake, not quite anything. The body didn’t move. I watched a shadow cross the duvet and felt like someone else entirely.
There is no climax to this illness. It refuses narrative. It doesn't want to end or begin. I keep thinking of windows, how light touches everything without asking permission, how it finds skin even when the blinds are shut. That kind of intrusion. That kind of grace. I do not know what I am waiting for. I used to think change would come like thunder – loud, dazzling, irreversible. Now I understand it might be nothing more than a quiet forgetting. The way yesterday’s bruise pales into skin again, the way dust gathers until it becomes a room.
When I was able to move through the world, I did so with velocity. I wore certainty like a borrowed coat. I thought I could run fast enough to arrive where I had not yet become. But stillness teaches you the opposite: that becoming isn’t linear, and often, it isn’t even visible. That growth might look like disappearing. Preciado writes, "I have only to close my eyes to write, to return to my body." But sometimes my eyes are closed and there is no body to return to. Just breath, faint. The absence of alarm. I want to say I am not sad, to offer that line like a gift, a shield, a small mercy. But that would be a kind of lie – the gentle kind, the kind people tell at bus stops and in waiting rooms, to strangers and mothers. There is sadness here, a quiet one. It doesn’t howl. It doesn’t bleed dramatically onto the floor. It sits beside me like an old friend, like someone who once broke my heart and never left. A sadness that doesn't want to be healed, only witnessed.
But alongside it, entangled in its hem, there is something else. Something softer, more fragile than grief. Maybe a tenderness – I don’t know the word for it. It arrives without explanation, like music through the walls, like light that doesn’t ask for permission. A tenderness that wraps itself around the version of me who has stopped trying. Who has put down the tools, the mirror, the mask. Who is not inventing a future or repairing the past. Who is simply not. Not sculpting. Not becoming. Just existing in this bare, unbeautiful moment, without defence or desire.
I lie here, still and unbecoming, and something in me loosens. The part of me that always needed to be more – more polished, more strong, more certain – lets go. There is no need for better here. Only breath. Only time passing like a slow leak. Only the ache in my legs and the hum in my chest and the sense that I am still alive, even if I’m not doing anything to earn it. This tenderness – it hurts. It is the ache of meeting yourself without improvement, without adornment, and staying. It is the ache of loving the version of you that doesn't rise, doesn't sparkle, doesn't try to be seen. The version that simply is.
Ernaux's voice echoes in this stillness – low, clear, without decoration. Not comforting, exactly, but familiar, like a song you forgot you knew. She writes of passion, but it is time she truly mourns: the impossible task of holding the present still, of keeping it from vanishing the moment it begins. That ache – hers – settles into my own as I lie here, trying to pin the moment down with words, knowing even the effort of naming it pushes it further away.
I wonder constantly: where does the present go when it slips through us? Is it folded into the crease of an unmade bed? Does it pool in the corner of a cold coffee cup, evaporating with the steam? Is it tucked away in a missed phone call, in the low ring that never rose into action, just hovered in the air like a held breath? Or maybe the present is what clung to me as I lay sweating, feverish, soaked in the moment without knowing I was in it. By the time I noticed, it was already memory. Already too late.
Maybe the present isn’t lost. Maybe it bruises. Maybe it stains. I wonder if it lives in the imprint my body leaves on the mattress, or in the smell of something burnt when I forgot the stove. Tiny wreckages of now. Maybe the present is a kind of accident – always just passed, always dissolving before it can be held. Maybe that’s why it hurts. Because we are asked to live in it, but we can only ever watch it go.
Some afternoons, I talk to the sheets. To the pills in their blister packs. I don’t expect answers, only recognition. I want to be named by something without language. I want to be seen by the ordinary things I once ignored. The corner of the desk. The sound of the neighbour dragging a chair. The water, always running somewhere. Time is a fugitive in this place. It doesn’t tick; it weeps. Some hours feel like velvet. Others bite. The body shifts imperceptibly – an ache lifting, a muscle loosening, a cough replaced by silence. These are victories, but small ones. I do not write them down. I forget them. But forgetting is also a kind of living.
I wish someone would ask me how long it takes to comb hair when your hands shake. Or how it feels to miss your own smell. These are questions no one asks. I ask them to myself and answer with metaphors that feel unearned. The truth is: I don’t know. I don’t know anything except that I want to keep going, if only to see the next quiet. I do not want to be made into a story about recovery. I do not want to be clapped for surviving. I want to be allowed to lose, to linger, to sob for no reason and for reasons I can’t say aloud. I want to be a person even when I am not strong.
There is no rhythm. Or maybe the rhythm is just strange. Long pauses where nothing happens. A flicker of clarity. The taste of something I remember from childhood. The hours stretch like elastic. I pull and pull and sometimes they snap. When I think about change now, I think of sediment. Layers settling. I think of the way wounds stop bleeding. Not because of any miracle, but because the body can’t keep opening forever. That’s the closest I can get to hope. Sometimes I press a hand to my chest and wait for the beat. I pretend it is someone else’s hand. I pretend it is a kind of love.
The future does not look back. It keeps going. It doesn’t care what shape I take, only that I am still, somehow, inside it. I watch old videos of myself and don’t recognise the person. But I don’t mourn them either. They are not gone, only stretched thin, translucent. Nelson says, "We pass." We pass through, we pass as, we pass over. I feel as though I’ve passed into something I don’t yet understand. A threshold without a name. Not a transformation, not a transition – just an interval. A soft interval. The kind that doesn’t ask for applause. There are moments when the stillness folds in on itself. When the silence grows so thick I want to scream just to tear a hole in it. But I don’t. I lie there, waiting for the air to thin. For the room to return. For the self to return. Or not. Either way.
If I leave this bed, I will carry something with me. Not wisdom, exactly. But a scar in the shape of time. A patience I never asked for. I will walk slower. I will cry more easily. I will be late. I will forgive more than I should. There is no lesson here. No insight I can sell back to the world. Only a foggy testament to what it means to lie down and not know when you’ll get up. Only the quiet terror of breathing. The stubbornness of breath.
Today, I watched a spider cross the ceiling. It moved with such clumsy purpose, legs reaching and folding like questions with no answers. The path wasn’t elegant. It faltered, circled back, paused as if lost in thought or caught in doubt. And yet it moved. As if movement alone was worth something. As if arriving wasn’t the point. I wanted to tell it I understood. That it was enough just to move. To keep going even when you don’t know if you’re going anywhere. To try, not with hope, but with habit. The kind of movement born not from belief in a destination, but from the refusal to stop entirely. A kind of stubborn grace.
Later, it began weaving a web – anxiously, obsessively – thread pulling from its body. It worked without elegance, buffeted by the open window’s breeze. Each strand trembled, the whole architecture shivering against the breath of spring. The web clung to corners it hadn’t chosen, sagged where the silk was too fine, glistened in the pale light like something trying too hard not to fall apart. And still, it built. As if building made the day matter. As if effort could outlast the wind. I watched its small body strain, and I wanted to cry for no reason except that something so small was trying so hard.
Isn’t that what I’ve been doing, too? Threading together pieces of myself in this quiet room, hoping something will hold? Not beautiful. Not symmetrical. Just enough not to unravel. The spider didn’t look finished. I don’t think it ever meant to be.
Tomorrow, maybe I’ll sit up. Maybe I won’t. Maybe the light will fall a little differently and I will mistake it for change. Maybe it will be change. Maybe this is what change looks like: an untidy room, a fading bruise, the smallest breath drawn just a little deeper.
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
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As a faerie soul living within chronic illness, I identify with what you have written here.