Solar Time
by Jean George
My body was always trying to keep up with my mind. I wish my body would carry me. Instead, I have to drag it. The damp cold made it all worse. I tried to fight it by contracting my muscles. But I’d heard that was pointless – counterproductive, in fact. So I tried to relax. I should have just walked to stay warm. Forced the body to move. Reinvigorate it. I glanced back at the street corner, hoping the bus would materialise. Hopes of progress on the first day back to university.
The weather was typical of late September. Summer hasn’t quite left your mind, and you think it’ll stretch out just a little longer, but no. Wearing a coat was the ultimate indicator that the fair season had ended. The joy of not wearing a coat! Come to think of it, most of the year we wear coats. How tragic, really.
I thought of the upcoming change of time in a few weeks. If only solar time were aligned with standard time, then the sun would rise earlier, and one wouldn’t have to wake up in the dark every morning. Only then would it set earlier, and one would have to come back home after dark. A catch-22. Choose one of two: morning or evening, you can’t have both. Society had chosen: the evening. Society was really not made for hard-working, serious, morning people like me. It was made for the leisurely extroverts. A large part of me truly did believe that. But I felt slightly guilty for thinking it. Weren’t those long summer evenings so pleasant?
A mother and her child had appeared next to me. The boy was fidgety and looking at an advertising panel for distraction. It showed a football player whose name even I knew, arms akimbo, legs wide apart. I wondered why his shirt was so tight. The child imitated the pose and then took an imaginary free kick in slow motion, making a slow swooshing sound with puckered lips as he struck the air with his leg. I marvelled at him.
I saw the bus turning the corner in the distance. I got on. About midway through the journey, some raised voices broke my chain of thought. A woman I recognised as one of my past lecturers was confronting a townie who was listening to music on a speaker. Everyone was looking attentively to see who would prevail.
About a half-hour later, I arrived at my first lecture of the day, Linear Algebra, slightly late, because the bus had got stuck in traffic. Only one seat was left on the edge of the back row.
One hour in, I heard a voice over the ambient murmur of the lecture theatre. It was my neighbour. “Mind if I quickly check what you wrote there? I missed that last bullet.” The lecturer had just moved on to the next slide after finishing reading out a particularly dense, drab one. I showed her my notes. She then asked if I could explain to her a part of the proof she hadn’t quite understood from that slide. I did, and so started our relationship.
Her name was Joan. She had that confident air about her which usually made me feel threatened, and that was enhanced by fashionable yet understated, effortless clothes: that kind of beauty that was ‘put into relief by poor dress’.
A fine face indeed. Her smile line was more pronounced on the right than on the left.
Cette nymphe, je la veux perpétuer. Yes, she was the kind of girl you wanted to possess, but that also made you acutely aware of your own shortcomings: you can’t give her that feeling of rapture she must be granted. The French had a word for it, in a way, that ability to sweep away: mâle. How Grand Siècle! But my female self was not mâle, unfortunately.
If only I could possess her. In that non-threatening yet powerful way. Make her feel safe (of course) but with an inkling – yes, it was small, but there all the same – of potential to be swept away. That precious balance that had to be struck, especially nowadays. My mind paused, out of breath. Shit. Should I be thinking this? Wasn’t that the kind of thing that could expose you as a boor? I wasn’t sure. I really did think there was some truth to it – more than some, in fact.
The thing is, I happened not to be too bad-looking either. Or so others seemed to think. Which I always found strange, come to think of it – especially when looking at myself in a mirror. The result was that people often confused me for what I wasn’t.
The lecture ended, and there was an hour to kill. We headed out. “Going for a quick smoke,” she said, nodding towards the smoking area as we got out of the hall. I hated that I loved the smell of cigarettes. And most of all, the way they made a beautiful person look. “I’m all right,” I said, as she offered me one, seeing I didn’t have any. She seemed disappointed.
We paused while she lit up and inhaled. I noticed a group of students pass by, chatting and laughing as they headed towards the library. How plain, almost shabby, they looked. I really never understood that. They are happier than you. Perhaps better than you, in fact.
We chatted about the modules we’d taken the previous year.
“Oh, so you know Ant then,” she said, after I told her I’d taken a certain unit.
“I don’t think so,” I said. There was just no way to soften it. And I certainly wasn’t going to admit I knew of him. She seemed slightly surprised by my response.
“I know Ben, though.” Ben was a friend of Joan’s, and I’d been his tutorial partner for a while last year.
“Oh, nice! Able to make it to his party, Friday? I think Will and Rebecca should be coming too.” I had no clue who they were.
“Don’t think I’ll be able to make it, sadly,” I said, as though I had been invited.
“Me and my mates’ll be having one ourselves too. Saturday. You should come,” she continued. I pictured the party in my head: the drinking, the girls. I considered saying yes, but stopped myself.
“Ah, I can’t Saturday,” I said, though, again, I gave no real excuse.
“Oh, no worries then,” she said, politely. I steered the conversation back to academics.
Other students joined the smoking area and lit up.
“How’s it going, Joan? Think I saw you in the lecture theatre back there. Didn’t know you were taking Linear Algebra this year.” They’d lived in the same hall last year, apparently. They introduced themselves to me and then started chatting with Joan about their holidays. It turned out they’d both stayed in Mallorca just one week apart and missed each other.
I thought much about Joan in the hours that followed. Near the end of the day, I ran into her again at a tutorial. She sat next to some other friends of hers, and I joined them, barely having said a word since introducing myself outside. The class itself, however, made me more loquacious, and I was able to help Joan and a few of her friends with some of the exercises.
After the tutorial, I was left alone with her. I felt like going home, and she was heading towards the library, which was on the way to the bus stop. A beautiful silence lingered as we walked. Noticing the darkening evening sky, I let myself go. “We really should get rid of Summer Time. The sun should have long set by now, if we were naturally aligned to solar time,” I said, in my listless, slightly ridiculous way. Silence settled back again. I understood from her puzzled look that I had not spoken the right language.
“Oh, yeah, what an interesting thing to say,” she said with no meanness whatsoever. Although I was afraid I’d misspoken, she didn’t seem to hold it against me. Yet I worried she truly did not understand my language.
“I’m turning left here,” I said. “Guess I’ll see you around then.”
“See you, then.” Joan waved good-bye warmly.
I walked the way back. And good thing I did, as, on the corner of the street, I was given to behold a wondrous beech, as a ray pierced through the clouds – its tortured trunk breaking through the pavement, its brilliant silver bark, its still-vibrant green leaves. One of those beeches that outlives tarmac. That beech. That was it.
I didn’t sit next to Joan the next day. As I passed the smoking section after one of my lectures, I saw her and her friends, each a little planet in its own starless solar system. I caught her eye quickly. She nodded, kindly. The kiss of death. Poor Joan, she probably truly was a good person.
Jean is a writer based in New York. They have previously been published in Effy Literary magazine.