Peeking out from beneath the covers, I looked outside—past the window blinds’ wooden slats—to see budding evidence of what might become a brilliant sunrise. Two hours had passed since I woke, intending to get out of bed and go about my day. But, instead, I had drifted off to sleep again, wasting the precious darkness of those pre-dawn hours on pointless dreams. I wonder which are more likely to come to fruition: dreams that fill my head while I sleep or fantasies that keep the world at bay while I am awake? Both, I fear, are futile efforts to stem the relentless march of predictable reality. All of us dream or wish or hope or yearn for a different reality. But when a different reality presents itself, we realize the mirror’s glass is irretrievably fractured.
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It was never soon enough to take action to prevent the inevitable collapse. But it was always too late.
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The trees, with their jagged grey branches, long-since barren of leaves, seem to have given up. Fighting the relentless winter season, the trees decided, is wasted effort. Only time will reveal whether any life is left in their drab, brittle boughs. But the forest floor, littered with broken twigs and shattered limbs, suggests the time left to those trees is brief—if not already gone. The trunks of the larger trees already fallen will take years to decompose. Eventually, though, the only evidence they existed will be in the soil that feeds new growth. The inexorable cycle of life and death will continue in these forests until the land is cleared and covered with temporary housing for the next three or four generations of interlopers who insist on four bedrooms and temperature control in every room.
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Happiness is contextual, as is sadness and catatonia. Everything, in fact, is contextual. All emotions and all responses to internal and external stimuli exist on an immeasurably long spectrum. That continuum seems so long because it is circular; every point a beginning and every point an end. We express opinions that follow that circuit, too. Everything that is, was. And everything that was, is. When the sun’s fuel is finally exhausted, as it unquestionably will be, time as we know it today will have been exhausted, as well. The end of the universe could be just over the horizon, you know; but you dare not express the possibility for fear of causing the termination to come sooner than later. How could you explain your role in causing the end of everything? It’s best to simply ignore the one final certainty until it’s too late to do anything about it. And it’s always too late to do anything about it; unless you had started to act when there was still a possibility…but there was never a possibility, was there?
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I am finished for the moment. How long does a moment last? When does it begin? Can a moment be extended?
