Time

It is the simplest thing that reels you in and ties you up, the first in a series of actions that paralyzes beyond stillness, that drives you to pause and once paused makes you frenetic with the impossibility of the motion you have lost. The impossibility of once-there now-gone in half an instant of not-understanding, of every reference-point burning into non-existence until behind your eyes the after-glow of your vision is fading and the reflection is a reflection of an imagination and reality is not your eyes open or your eyes closed, is not your hands grasping or your hands lying still by your sides, is not your mouth moving, making words you do not understand, or your mouth silent, afraid of the words because you understand them, but reality is that plane on the other side of a dimension you can’t touch can’t taste can’t smell can’t hear can’t see – out of range.

A moment is a fluid, watery piece of thought you pretend you can parse through, the second ticking to the time of the minute to the time of the hour to the digitization of a heartbeat, but why then is this moment so much more than the one before it? Why is this the moment that stretches into a second dimension, then a third, growing first into a line and then a wall to separate BEFORE and AFTER, to separate THEN and NOW, to separate WAS and IS.
And that point, when a point, was still erasable, now irascible, no longer removable with the edge of a pencil and a few soft strokes, with the breeze from an open window, no longer removable even with every tool of demolition we rush to employ, first with the hammer, then the bull-dozer, then the wrecking ball; a wall of impossible strength, permanent, opaque.