Time in Motion

I woke up tomorrow, refreshed. And I will wake up yesterday, equally as spent as the day after tomorrow.

Time is cylindrical most days, spherical in others. Its texture mimics the odor of bravery or the taste of sullen defeat. We treat time as if it were invisible, like the concept some call God, but its shape and size and countenance are as clear to us as that decaying face in the mirror, if only we allow ourselves to see it. We encase the passage of time in photographs, capturing babies growing into homeless alcoholics and greed-drenched politicians. We nurture it as we mold idealists into administrators—whose sole purpose is to bring mindless order to circumstances in which the potential beauty of chaos is ripe and ready. Time twists us into stone pretzels, deformed fossils of unrealized dreams and broken promises unwilling to bend or yield to concepts outside our parochial experience. Time is an allegory for pain, an illusion of meaning, when meaning never existed. Clothed in robes of memory and draped in hollow wishes, we claw our way from the womb to the mortuary, seeking satisfaction in a world in which there is no reason to be satisfied. The only satisfaction is time gone by, that worn and weary remnant of struggles and mistakes and those temporary victories swept away by losses too enormous to comprehend.

Sadness, as deep as the vault within which the Milky Way was buried at the end of its pointless reign, will wash around the remnants of time, flushing the rubble of existence into the drain from which nothing can emerge. Black holes are harbingers of time expunged. When the gravity of our mistakes and our dangerous folly tilt the scale of celestial justice, black holes and their hidden progeny will swallow time and its accouterments. Even dreams cannot break the bonds of the end of time.

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
This entry was posted in Writing. Bookmark the permalink.

I wish you would tell me what you think about this post...

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.