The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

25 The Cogwheel of Time 2009

I don’t know what happened to my Heidi, any more than those seven thousand other people whose paths I’ve crossed in my days. I see on the net that every day the equivalent of half the population of Iceland dies. That’s 100 people a minute, 1.6 people a second. I guess we could call that the speed of human history.

The cogwheel of time keeps on turning, and a hundred ants are crushed with each rotation. While the rest of us try to climb that gigantic wheel to escape the relentless onslaught of the cog, those who dwell ‘above’ can enjoy life. But they’re barely halfway through their champagne glasses when they suddenly find themselves ‘below’ again and have to rush if they don’t want to be squashed as time meets space.

Seven billion ants form a glistening black ‘tyre’ around the toothed wheel, which flattens as it rolls against the ground, like the punctured tyre of an old lorry.

That’s the life that some genius created for us people of the earth, setting those famous parameters called the cradle and the grave. Life never allows anyone to relax, no one except me, lying here in my sorry old state, waiting for the cogwheel to drag me down to my end.