Often I find myself wanting to write something, and the feeling emerges that now is the time to do so. Now is the time to write something that will release this feeling into some tangible words of thought. But perhaps that will never happen, because they are just feelings, and feelings can’t be translated into thoughts, and so it remains, in the cavity of my chest, until it dissipates, like all things, from being forgotten.
And what is this emotion I am feeling? That you feel? That all of us grapple with and face? Is it the feeling of time and its effects? Of its casualties? For what does time to do us but make us and everything we ever loved disappear? Kingdoms, mighty things, become a half-forgotten line you hear once in conversation, a tidbit, a joke. You see the most powerful and famous vanish from these woods, these fields and deserts, but the trees remain, and the offspring of the grass, and the sand.
The disappearance of everything is inevitable. You will not find a door out of here. There are no exits or escape lines. You remember those around you from before you were even you. Remember those giants who walked the world when you were a babe? Some of their bones lay in boxes not far from you and me even now. And a flower blooms over their stones, and its petals obscures the letters of their name.
A descecration, perhaps, a mockery, total. This world was never meant to be anything more than a stopgap. We come and go, we patrons of flesh, and marvel at some new thing. We are dazzled by the breeze. The wind blows new rumors and toys while we hide our skin’s compression. The canopy is sagging.
Remember old people? Remember middle-aged people? Adults? Teenagers? You will be all of them, if you’re lucky. You don’t plan on getting old. You don’t much like it. The ship has rust and barnacles stuck all over and nothing can be scraped off. Time is coming for everyone you love, and for you, too.
And so men and women make lives with goods from the earth and raise offspring. They laugh and cry and try to make sense of it all. Who plans to have the life they have? Did you? You must have thought something else would happen. Didn’t you?
What did you think you would be? Why did you think this? You see a solution, to something, and you push for its enactment. You gain power but it’s temporary power, see, temporary winning, see, and the whole chess board shakes every one hundred years. The pieces fall off like stones from a cliff’s crumbling ledge, until the new pieces are put up, and the game starts over.
Was the last game a rumor? What is the past but stories from nowhere? How could any of this apply to you? You aren’t them, and they aren’t you. They couldn’t possibly understand. You know them better than they knew themselves, though you don’t know you at all.
So the sins of all souls are gears to be wound up and played out, again and again. A music box, this earth is, and we are its parts. We do not learn much. Sometimes lessons take many generations to be forgotten, even more to be regained, and many more to be lost altogether.
You stand on a street corner. Somebody was murdered here. Slain. You don’t know this, but there were flowers here once, more flowers here than you can ever hope to try to know. A field of bouquets for somebody’s rude ending. You stand on the grave of a grave.
A sun rises from the east and stars make haste to fade. You feel the chill of this world damper, if but for the twinkling of your eyes. Light shines on you and you forget all this future and all this past. You don’t move. You feel it all and let it overtake you. There is no other way. There never was.
