Listening to Jafar Panahi speak about his film It Was Just An Accident made me think about my life, the things that I do, the things that I say I’ll do, my half-baked words and actions, the things that make me the regrettable quagmire of contradictions that I am.
I know one thing and one thing only: time passes. No matter the tastes and pains, the magic and nothingness-eses, that’s what it does. It passes.
I’m on the side of a narrow, cold channel. The lighthouse is in the distance. I take off my boots and socks and make my way across the kelp and rocks, expecting to fall, my body to wash out with the tide, found in the years to come, a human interest story on the northeast tip of Sanday Island in the Orkneys.
It is not as difficult as I imagine and brush the sand off my feet as I examine the small bird skull. The path winds beside a fallow field. The nettles are thick. I look back, wondering if the tide is already rising and I will be stuck here for the night. The lighthouse is fenced in and fully automated.
I return along the coast and am dive-bombed by oystercatchers. They screech and shit, and I scream back and throw rocks. They terrify me.
The tide rises, and I walk in the knee-deep water. There is an ancient tomb at the side of the road, but it has been covered over. Sheep stare back, their bodies oddly sheered and painted blue. I want to write, but I don’t know what about. Something true and real. Something fantastic and simple. Something about what I was doing here. Can oystercatchers be trained? And who will play me?
