Years begin and end with movement.
They must - how else does a wandering mind mark the unrelenting march of time?
Celebrating year’s end is arbitrary nonsense, and being arbitrary, pointless and without meaning, it fills you with dread year on year.
And so -
Run!
Run to people who never want to be the safe place you need.
Hide!
Hide in a different town, a different state, a different bed, a different body, until you can pretend that you aren’t the same.
Jump!
Jump into a job, a hobby, a relationship, from a plane. Anything to distract you from the inevitability of
Time.
It’s always time.
Too much, not enough.
Too slowly, too fast.
Birth, sickening, dying, death.
When you were eighteen, you and your best friends traded a book about time, and you still think about it. You reread it annually, aware all the time of the revolting irony - you’re reading a book you’ve already read, wasting time you won’t get back.
(The book is about the time you won’t get back, and the perils of wasting it. If your life were a movie, it would be a tone deaf tale of awkward, unfunny irony.)
The heat of summer reminds you of life.
How can it not, when the southern sun bakes life from your skin and the river flows by without pause, utterly unconcerned with your silly little moments?
Summer is life.
It’s a new year.
A new try.
Maybe this year, you’ll get it right.
About the Creator
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Red Shelves
Death is a black hole. Think about it. A black hole is the corpse of a star, something once warm and bright, now come to the end of its life cycle. But some will argue that the cycle of life does not end with death. That death is merely another path we must walk once our bodies expire and our souls ascend. In that moment, when the fuel in the star’s chemical tank hits empty and the shiny matte coat explodes into supernova, the mass left behind – the corpse – becomes a black hole. We understand that, around such a vast cadaver, dimensions work a little differently in death to the way we’re used to in life. For example, light cannot escape the pull of a black hole when it hits the point of no return. That’s where it gets its colour. Space itself is contorted by a black hole. That’s where it gets its funny shape. Even time. Time slows right down the closer you get to it. The closer you get to a black hole. The closer you get to death.
By Matthew Curtis6 days ago in Humans
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