Doing Nothing

I am on the cusp of doing nothing.

When I am working through the tasks that are lined up in front of me, i.e. ‘what I have on my plate right now,’ I am also trying to slow to a halt.

But then an existing process requires some attention or a new process suggests itself and must be set in motion.

I have previously come very close to doing nothing.  We had exactly one too few spoons of a certain size in our cutlery drawer.  Once I had purchased another spoon there would be nothing left to do, and I did successfully purchase exactly the specific spoon required.

But when I got back home, a bowl had been overturned.

Notes On The Erection Of The Billboard Showing Gigantic Galloping Horses In The Town

That morning you had cut your hair into the shape of a house.

I couldn’t wait to see it. The look of triumph in your tuna-mayonnaise eyes.

Emoji-ing my way along the street, thinking about what I was into, stream-of-consciousness stuff…

On some rain-toussled scratch of land by the turning for the industrial estate, some hi-vis dayjobbers were using wood to construct a new 3D space for displaying 2D pictures.

I was on your street then I was in your home. I kissed your cheek and nuzzled in, rubbing my eye in the kiss-wet on the curve of your face.

Then we watched music videos together before fucking in a big pile of balloons.

By the time we had finished, your house was reduced to rubble.

You said you had to shop for a box full of pockets for something you were up to. So we went back out in to that damp and fidgety world.

Now the erection of the billboard was complete and they were using rollers to paste up the first of the pictures that would cover that new space.

Your hair fell around your face like a tonne of bricks.

Some dogs passed by with some people. Those people didn’t look like the kind of people who should own dogs.

Sometimes we just liked to make up things like this and say them out loud to one another.

Cars were whizzing past us but we just stood and stayed there, looking.

On the billboard, galloping hooves had appeared and now some horse legs too.

My hands were in your pockets and your hands were in my pockets.

Drizzle rain was slow-clapping to the ground and making invisible things. All the cars had their garlic-butter headlights on.

But the rain hit us differently to the way it hit everyone else.  Our very selves glowed with the righteousness of knowing that.

Pretty soon they had added the straining bodies of what were probably horses and then some grimacing faces that confirmed the fact.

A band of horses twenty-feet tall were racing towards us, kicking up little cakes of turf as they came. A line of miniature birds formed a queue on top of the picture.

We stood in front of the horses and laughed so hard we were crying and then our crying mixed in with the rain which was hitting us just the way it did.

Those gigantic horses looked so supremely lifelike.

Other people’s existences were not running as smoothly as ours – their lives were going wrong, frame by frame by frame.

They were stopping their cars. They were getting out. They were looking at the billboard. They were clutching their heads in their hands. They were screaming. They were running away through the industrial estate.

We were meat and bones like those gorgeous gigantic galloping horses’ meat and bones.

Next you were going to cut your hair into the shape of a horse and I was going to ride it to several famous victories.