time

In the village of Bellweather, nobody knew how old they were.They knew when they were children because their feet did not touch the floor from their chairs. They knew when they were old because the stairs became difficult and the names of dead friends began to outnumber the names of living ones. But nobody could say they were seventeen, or forty-three, or eighty-six. There were no clocks in Bellweather, no calendars, and no agreed-upon way to divide a life into smaller pieces. The sun rose. The sun disappeared. People went to work when they were hungry and came home when they were tired. Weddings happened when the gardens were full of flowers. Funerals happened when the ground was soft enough to dig. The villagers were not particularly troubled by this. They had never known anything different. Except for a girl named June. June kept a notebook. She had found it in the back of her father's wardrobe, beneath a stack of letters he had never sent. The cover was green, the corners worn white, and the first page smelled faintly of smoke. She had been small enough to sit inside the kitchen cupboard when she found it, though she had no way of knowing how small she had been. On the first page, she wrote: the day mother stopped singing. She did not know the date, of course. There was no date. So she drew a little black flower beside the sentence and turned the page. On the next, she wrote: the day my brother taught me to swim. A blue wave. Then: the day father said he was going to the market and never came home. A black door. She filled the notebook with things like this. The day the neighbor's dog had puppies. The day the roof fell in during a storm. The day she met a boy named Thomas who told her that clouds were just the sky remembering the sea. Thomas was the first person she showed the notebook to. They were sitting behind the abandoned church, where the grass grew tall enough to hide their shoes. Thomas had been trying to catch a grasshopper. June had been watching him fail. "What's that?" he asked. "A book." "I can see that." "It's a book of days." He looked at her. "There aren't any days." "There are," she said. "We just don't know what to call them." Thomas considered this with the seriousness he reserved for things he did not understand. Then he asked, "Why?" June turned the notebook toward him. "Because I don't want to forget." Thomas looked at the pages. He read about her brother, her father, the dog, the roof, and the clouds. He read the little black flower beside the sentence about her mother. "Does your mother still sing?" he asked. "No." "Oh." He sat beside her. They listened to the wind moving through the grass. After a while, Thomas kissed her. It was a small, clumsy thing. Their noses bumped, and Thomas laughed against her mouth, and June told him to shut up. Then he kissed her again, more carefully, and for a little while she forgot the notebook entirely. Later, when she was alone, she opened it to a fresh page. the day thomas kissed me behind the church. She drew a little red heart. Then, underneath it, she wrote: i hope this never ends. She would come to regret that sentence. Not because Thomas was unkind. He was, for a long time, very kind. He brought her apples from his mother's garden and sat with her on the church steps while she read aloud from her notebook. He learned to recognize her handwriting. He could identify a memory by the shape of the little drawing beside it. He even began keeping a notebook of his own. His was less organized. He wrote down things like the day the soup tasted strange and the day June got angry because I said her drawings looked like vegetables. She told him they did not. He told her the black flower looked like a turnip. She stopped speaking to him until he apologized. They were happy in the way people are happy when they have not yet learned that happiness is something they will eventually have to explain. But Bellweather was a village, and villages have a way of changing people without asking them first. Thomas's father became ill. Thomas began working longer hours at the mill. June started spending more time alone. When they met behind the church, he was often tired, and she was often angry, and neither of them knew how to say that they missed being the people they had been. One afternoon, June asked him whether he still loved her. Thomas looked toward the road. "Of course I do." "Then why don't you come by anymore?" "I'm here now." "That's not what I asked." He rubbed his hands together. They were rough from work, and there was a thin white scar across his left thumb. "I don't know what you want me to say, June." She wanted him to say that he remembered the grasshopper. She wanted him to remember the way the light had fallen across his face when he first kissed her. She wanted him to tell her that he had noticed she was sad, that he had missed her, that something inside him had been keeping count even when neither of them knew how. Instead, he said, "Things change." She looked at him for a long time. Then she went home and opened her notebook. the day thomas stopped loving me. She drew a black door. She stared at it for a while, then crossed out the sentence. She tried again. the day i realized i could not make someone stay. She did not draw anything beside that one. Thomas left Bellweather after his father died. He said he wanted to see the ocean, which was something people did when they could no longer bear the familiarity of their own lives. June walked with him to the edge of the village. "Will you come back?" she asked. "I don't know." "How long will you be gone?" Thomas looked at the road stretching out before him. "June, there isn't a way to know that." She hated him a little for saying it. She hated him more for being right. He kissed her forehead, picked up his bag, and left. June watched him until the road bent around the trees and he was gone. Then she went home. In her notebook, she wrote: the day thomas left. She drew a black door. For a long time, she thought this was the worst thing that could happen to a person. To be left without knowing how long the leaving would last. To be given no date to circle, no anniversary to dread, no number to tell her when she was supposed to stop missing him. She waited for Thomas through spring, when the flowers returned, and through the season when the apples ripened, and through the cold that settled over Bellweather and turned the river to glass. She waited until waiting became indistinguishable from living. And then, one morning, she woke up and did not think of him. It was not a decision. She did not wake up healed. She simply opened her eyes, noticed that the window needed cleaning, and got out of bed. She made breakfast. She went to the market. She spoke to her neighbor about a broken fence. It was an ordinary morning. That evening, she opened her notebook. She turned to the page about Thomas leaving and read it several times. Then she wrote beneath it: the day i forgot to miss him. She drew a little yellow sun. She was so pleased with herself that she laughed. Then she began to cry, because she realized she could not remember the last time she had cried over him, either. She had been waiting for the sadness to end as though it were a visitor who had promised to leave. She had imagined there would be some great moment of departure, a final morning when she would rise from bed and discover that the past had released her. Instead, it had happened without her noticing. She closed the notebook. Outside, the village was growing quiet. A woman was calling her children inside. Somewhere, a dog barked. The sky had turned the pale gray color it sometimes took before rain. June sat by the window and wondered how many other things had ended without her knowing. Her childhood. Her father's absence. The sound of her mother's singing, which she could barely remember anymore. The small, ordinary happiness she had once possessed without understanding that it was happiness. She wondered how much of her life she had spent waiting for something to happen, never realizing that something else was happening in its place. Years passed. Or perhaps they did not. June grew older, and her hair turned silver, and the stairs became difficult. The children in Bellweather began calling her Miss June, and then, eventually, simply June, as if her name were something the village had inherited from her. She continued writing in her notebook. She wrote about the first time she saw the ocean. She wrote about a little girl who brought her flowers every morning. She wrote about the day her mother died, which she remembered by the smell of wet earth and the sound of rain tapping against the windows. She wrote until her handwriting became unsteady. One evening, a boy came to visit her. He was the grandson of her neighbor, and he had found an old clock in the attic of his house. It was round and wooden, with two hands and a face covered in little black marks. He placed it on June's table. "What is it?" he asked. June looked at the clock. For a moment, she could not speak. She had heard stories about clocks, of course. Some people said they had once been common, that people used them to divide their lives into hours and minutes. Others said they were a kind of superstition, a way for people to pretend that the world belonged to them. June had never seen one before. She picked it up carefully. The hands did not move. "What does it do?" the boy asked. "I think," June said, "it tells you how long you've been alive." The boy frowned. "Why would you need to know that?" June looked out the window. The garden was full of flowers. Somewhere down the road, a woman was calling her children inside. The sky was turning gray, and rain was beginning to fall. She thought of Thomas, who had wanted to see the ocean. She thought of her father, who had gone to the market and never come home. She thought of her mother, whose singing she could no longer recall except as a feeling, like the warmth of a room she had once lived in. She thought of all the things she had waited for, and all the things that had ended while she was busy waiting. "I don't know," she told the boy. She returned the clock to him. That night, June opened her notebook for the last time. She turned to a blank page and held her pen above it. For a long while, she did not write anything. She listened to the rain and watched the shadows move across the ceiling. By morning, she was gone. The boy found her notebook on the table and read it from beginning to end. He did not understand all of it, but he understood enough to know that the little black doors meant something sad, and the yellow suns meant something good. He took the notebook home and put it beside the clock. For a long time, he wondered what the world might have been like if people had known how to measure their lives. He imagined a world in which every day had a name, every year had a number, and every person could look at a clock and know exactly how much time they had left. He imagined people hurrying through their mornings, counting their birthdays, waiting for the afternoon, wishing they were older, wishing they were younger, wishing they had more time. He imagined them standing beside the people they loved and thinking about all the things they still had to do before the day was over. And he thought, perhaps, that it was better not to know. Outside, the sun rose. The flowers opened. The village went on living, as it always had, without knowing what to call the moments that made up a life. And somewhere, a little boy learned to swim. No one wrote it down.