The past, future and present, all experienced at once, in some sort of stand against the tension of living and dying; a raging against entropy; a pocket of space/time where miracles can happen.
Yes, but it turned out that nirvana could not be tamed. No, it does not linger—it also gets swept up in the tides of life.
The pocket collapses, and then we are called to venture out into the darkness once more and carve out another pocket of happen-chance.
One moment, stretched out into all of infinity, throughout all of space/time, expanding out in the forever present.
She plays a violin in the concert hall in hopes that her notes will reach her dead mother. The notes travel from the strings and float up towards the sky. You see, a good song never dies. It travels the cosmos, and rides the eps and flow of all living things. The music lives. It lives. A song that reached the heavens, and made an angel cry up there. The sweet sound of her daughter touches her soul, and she grabs ahold.
The past echoes in our ears here in the present, and the future is our dreams—ideas we need to feed.
This guy, in a black hoodie, comes to collect my seconds, but, just like the rest of my life, I have to fight to keep them. We scuffle in the ally behind the bar. I dodge his scythe, but it nicks my neck. Blood trickles down and I grab my throat, squeezing it shut.
“Ha ha ha,” he laughs at me, pulling down his hoodie and revealing to me my own face on his body.
“There is no timelines where I don’t sink this scythe into your soft flesh and rip you open. It happens everytime. Everywhere. You always try to fight it, but it is inevitable. You were once assembled, and you will be disassembled. It is the way.”
He marched forward, coming for me.
I flipped him off with the hand that wasn't holding my neck together, and turned around and ran away.
“I’ll find you again, Chester! I always do!”
I jump up into the dark night sky and spread my wings. The stars reflect off of my eyes, as I fly upside down with my back to the earth. The light in my eyes is millions of years old. It has traveled all this way just for my eyes to catch their rays for a brief moment. It is all connected. It is all in harmony. And it is all in perfect chaos. Sweet life. Oh, sweet life. Let it flow.
She was stuck in time, and I got a message to go save her on my phone. I went, headfirst, into the fading past. When I did, though, I faded, too. I faded, too . . .
I grabbed her hand and pulled her up. She cried in my arms. I stroked her hair. My hand started to disappear. No one was near us to hear our screams. They might as well never have happened at all. I was being pulled back to my time. But, at least I saved her.
“I’ll meet you in the middle! I’ll find you again, in the future. Wait for me, babe. Wait for me, won’t you? . . . Won’t you?”
I was already gone. She got older. And the middle turned into a riddle—a waiting game. But a life lived waiting was no life at all, and I had to let the leaves fall. Yes, I watched them slowly float down to the ground. And then got up for another round. Around and around it all went, my time spent, and it felt like time was spending me. It felt like time was spending me . . .
“How did you write this book?” she asked me, as I signed her copy for her. “It is . . . a formidable attempt to try to explain the experience of time. These characters are so real. I love it with my whole soul. I have to know, how’d you do it?”
“I don’t know.” I handed her back her book.
“What? But you wrote it?”
“Hardly.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Me either.”
“You wrote this?” She held up the book with a distorted clock on it. Then she opened it up and pointed to my picture from a time when I was much younger and much more handsome. “This is you?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“So, how’d you do it?”
“ . . . I sat down every day and typed.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much.”
“How did such brilliance come from you?? You seem like—and I mean no disrespect by this—but you seem like an idiot.”
“I get that a lot.”
“How does an idiot write this? I am intelligent and I can’t write for shit.”
“Try being open to being dumber then.”
She glared at me, snapped the book shut and turned around. As she was walking away, she stopped and glanced over her shoulder, looking at me. I cocked my head to the side in question, and then smiled at her.
She scoffed at me and kept walking.
CH 11/19/23
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