Time

Some days are a real loss, or a win if you consider the writings of Dr Seuss.  Looking at the battery meter on the laptop computer, time is depicted as a draining potential.  But it has a fullness from which it has to start...

And so it is: Today was filled with pain, it was filled with longing, and finally, it was filled with reminiscence shared with souls of my kin.  This is a loss and it is a win.  I speak not of the lost time here.  I dare not mention time won, because time is an artifact we construct of necessity and guilt.  Time as an artifact of deliverance and guilt does not enter my life anymore.

I reconstruct the images.  The images reflect the experiences.  There is the image of my childhood friend.  She wears a simple dress and she kisses me, doll in hand as we imagine being husband and wife.  We know nothing, but we copy, and it leaves a mark.  It ignites a flame of commitment that I keep to this day.  Sealed with a kiss, we stand together.  Some walk away from this, with a shrug and a new-found love.  Pain has shades of intensity.

There is loss, and there is gain.  The images compress and the images dilate.  I see long summers and endless loneliness, I see winters filled with hope and letters smuggled  over school desks as I learn about the smell of nearness. 

We listen to music, we taste the shudders cuddled in a simple kiss.  The draining potential kicks in as soon as the link is made,  There is expectation and fear of loss, moments of unbridled optimism, and finally fact.  But time, I maintain, sits in the background, like a darkness, waiting to be constructed as a causality.  The doctrine of the what is and what will be lurks for those without the power of imagination!

I see toes wriggling innocently and with utter abundance.  It is the kick-start that gets energised by a walk down a passage and a sense of destiny.  There is no time connected to this.  These are just images that string together.  Some may call for causality, I call for the smell and the emotion of the image.  Yes, I defy the science and I defy the insistence on the ticks of time, I only see the movement of that fairy body and the golden hair that signaled my fate.  There is an image of the mother of my son that becomes my imagined future and a reality that dawns many images later.  Time passes, almost as an aside.

We look at the watches that hog our lives, the calendars that steal our love and our abandonment.  We read the days off and we count the hours.  These are the days of tragic loss as we calculate the seconds to our demise.

But I care not for these measures.  I live for the soft touch of lips, the moments of a shared hug when it is least expected, the handshake and the extended eye contact.  I live for the smell of self-love, carefully prepared after a warm shower and administered from a lovingly selected bottle of perfume.  I watch hair shift over a brow, and I see the varnish on a nail.  I see the sweat on a brow in a meeting and the intent in a frown.  I collect these images like shells at the seashore.

The tide comes in and the tide recedes.  It takes and it delivers.  I do not connect hours to these images.  Hours will detract from the feelings, hours will bring a blandness to the events.  Repetition is the bastard son of these time ticks, and I renounce the existence of this abomination.

No, I live with an image of the next and images cascading away from me to my birth.  I imagine the impossible and I extend my dreamy moments into the light of day.  If I can dream it, I can give birth to it.  My dreams are simple though.  I find the lips of my lover in a tender embrace, I am not older and I am not younger, and I smell the clear intent of closeness and I taste the urgency of life. 

It is now and as I imagine it.   I look at the footsteps of my God that walks before me.  The moment is an artifact of deliverance and I know no guilt as I walk the path I see unfolding before me.  The quick-snap lock of time is unsprung.