Beating

Helen Bowie

source: The Graphics Fairy

In the artificial warmth and light of the study at night, next to radiators and desk lamps, I can feel the clock in my heartbeat, a metronome in my arteries, set at 60 BPM.

In the silence, I expect to ruminate as I have done since March, to suffocate under the weight of the world, to crumble and break under the foot on my neck. Instead, I appreciate. I appreciate that there is no true silence in our inner-city home, as ambient love and the life beyond the walls are woven into the cloak of the night outside.

Around the sixtieth beat, the Twin Peaks music drifts into my consciousness; I feel it in my veins. For seven years and seven months it has been the incidental music of comfort and security, knowing that you are home with me, and in your happy place.

At beat one-hundred-and-twenty-three, I think about the warm caress of carpet under my feet. It simultaneously grounds me and holds me up. This floor is all ours and no landlord can tear the rug out from us now.

I own a carpet. We own a carpet together. I laugh alone at imagined euphemism, implied innuendo: 

“Oh, those two? They own a carpet together, if you know what I mean…”

or

“Oh, them? They share a kitchen, if you catch my drift…”

The horological metronome has been playing for just shy of two-hundred-and-forty beats when I realise that I am a cliché. I try to remember the statistics about how frequently it is that people allegedly think about sex, and how those statistics are usually broken down by gender. This seems at odds with harmony in a heteronormative society, but what do I know?

Harmony is in short supply in the world outside the window. Here though the metronome, the Twin Peaks soundtrack, the traffic noise, sing out in perfect harmony. My orchestral white noise.

The blue light of my phone appears like a sunrise on a new day, the clocks app springs into life with polyphonic birdsong.

It has been two-hundred-and-seventy-three beats of my metronome heart, and I am grateful for the harmony I have found in my own company, and in yours.

Helen Bowie is a writer, performer and charity worker based in London. She has appeared or is forthcoming in Versification, Queerlings, and Eater London, among others. Helen has one cat and lots of bafflingly strong opinions on extremely trivial matters. @helensulis