So, one moment steps on another and some moments step on many more. Spaghetti intersections for the most part, but sometimes we have that thing called a 'defining' moment - one that treads its way into so many others - enlightens them. I prefer to use the term 'dictating' moment. It was watching May swill that meat round in her mouth, following her bizarre clacking of cutlery that opened up mine - my dictating moment.
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Who could have known a box of cornflakes could cause so much gravity on the future? I didn't at the time, but that's how it turned out.
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I'd been in my kitchen at least a year before this macabre lunch we were having. I remember now I hadn't been hungry and had read most of the cornflakes packet before I went for a bowl. I'd been new to teaching back then and had been identifying every part of speech - isolating them:
'The original and best'
equals:
'Definite article - adjective - coordinating conjunction - superlative adjective.'
It was a dreadful habit that would come to put me off reading books for several years. Grammar took me from reading fifty books a year to reading a magazine article every leap year.
But, the terror of grammar is another story. One in which Nietzsche finally helped to save me. Jesus - that truly is another story, being pulled out of that abyss.
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I put the pot bowl on the table and leaned for the box. My hand knocked it over and the 'golden' (equals: archaic adjective) pieces spewed onto the table and the floor. Had I been hungry then I'd have gone into a swift rage. Nothing brings anger to me like having food ruined in front of my empty stomach. This time though, not really wanting to eat except to slake a little boredom, I felt the opposite. I could hear the drowsy skim of traffic in the distance and nothing else - a perfect soundtrack to how the scattered cornflakes made me feel. I stared at them for a bit, letting goose bumps rise on my arms and back - a sign of meditation I always think. Without even a hint of chill I saw the hairs on my arms waken, The goose bumps rippled in force again. Bliss.
I'd like to say I decided to do what I did next, but decision didn't come into it. It was something more primordial - it had to be. Yet, it involved numbers. I picked up the box, emptied the rest of the cornflakes onto the floor. Then I brushed my forearm over the table and swept the rest to the floor. After this I took the box and counted all the cornflakes one by one back into the box. Each flake dropped into the packet making a quick rustle.
I'm not sure how long it took me or how many flakes there were, but I got lost in that hour or two. That counting took me on, governed me. I just know I had no choice in it. Something guided me into it, blindfolded, muted and dumb, dropped me in the centre and made me count my way out, using cornflakes as a map. In that kitchen, if it was still a kitchen, there was me, and some forgotten counting. I don't believe, even now, that time or reason had much to do with it.
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It wasn't until this year or so later, seeing May switching hands for every cut, lifting the wretched dead meat into her gaping maw that the significance of it came to me. It was only then I realised how counting cornflakes could and would change my life.
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