Time slips from grasping fingers and skirts the shadows, smirking
I am thinking about Time. Or rather, I am feeling her — how capricious she is, how she slips from grasping fingers and skirts the shadows, smirking. She is magic and she is mischief: she gives the greatest gifts and then she takes them away. She is a sage guide and a cruel gaslighter. My, how she makes the heart swell, and the heart ache!
I read a piece yesterday, a short true story, about a brief bright flare of love a long while past. The story was somewhat of a dud, it ended abruptly and without satisfaction. But the beginning of it struck me:
“Always hard to believe the ways details vanish. Even what John Cheever once called the marvelous skulduggery of illicit love, time chips away and scatters, and what you’d thought would be seared for life? Reach for it, it’s gone.”
How true that line is! What you thought would be seared forever evaporates while you glance the other way. How many moments have struck me so deeply, have overpowered my sentiments, have drowned everything else that surrounded me until I was filled with nothing else? Yet I try to gaze upon them now and the feelings have softened to sand and the details have faded like ink in the sun.
I have always been terrible at writing things down. Expression comes in spurts and it directs itself to different places: a text here, an online post there, a scrawling on a plane ticket, an entry in one of endless online or paper journals. How much of my history is forgotten, how much scattered in these words, how much scattered in the wind and lost to the listless ages?
I have long wanted to compile these sources — copy the texts from old phones, scour my emails, my files, my blogs, my stacks of filled planners and half-scrawled journals, my scraps of memorabilia. What of me hides there? And what of me can never be found, never be reclaimed, even by reading the words writ down by my own pen?
Words are our best bet at capture, but even words are a sieve.
Such is the nature of Time, flickering and elusive. Think you hear a footfall at the forest’s edge, an exhaled breath, glimpse her eyes glinting in the moonlight. You hold your breath and stare intently into the darkness. But reach out your arm and she slinks back into the dense leaves of accumulated years. Your eyes will hallucinate her outline for an hour. But soon, the sense she gave you was so magical and the silence she left you with so complete, that you will wonder whether you ever really saw her at all, or she was only the gift of a beautiful figment.
