thundred

Nidas arkusauskas

June - August 2025

Thundred – A response

The slow spin, night and day, a silent refrain.

The crack in the side of the sky narrates our passage - before it is gone, before it has been blown out. And lo, our moon appears.

The people we love may be far away, but we hear them. Their voices catch the light and crack open that secret door in our hearts.

Still, we navigate the hours alone and so does he.

He follows that slow spin, I follow his eyes within. Come inside and have a gin.

Totality - that’s the word that comes to mind. So, too, does fraction. Fractions of time, fractions of a life, amounting to a difficult, beautiful whole.

As I sit down to write this, the thousands of grains of sand beneath my feet keep me upright. It was right to come here, and it was right, too, to return. Maybe you can hear something - maybe you can’t. Maybe you can hear something turning, softly, inside.

Our mirror neurons mirror the clock, mirror the wall, mirror the porthole window and mirror our brief window of time.

The face of the moon may be empty and round, but she’s still beautiful. There’s still a flash of light outside the wall, over the hedge, beyond the war. If we keep turning round, we might see it. We might see it, we might not. If you look closer, maybe you can see your own face on the glass.

Who’s mirroring who?

I keep myself in circles, it’s just what happens. It’s just where I go, it’s just this path I’m on. The same patterns fly, concentric, over my head. Same patterns, same parrots, same tiny particles of moon dust and plastic.

He has occupied many worlds.

He knows much more than this street; he feels beat after beat after beat.

But we are under this dome together - and though we move in parallel circles, the stars always glint slightly differently.

The world outside the window keeps turning - it never stops.

And sometimes you can’t see the display - all you get is the quiet angle of your own face, luminous and ever-changing against the road and the moonlit waves.

– CE