Bleeding Time

{Now Playing: "Someday", Steve Earle}

Day off today, Spring feels like it might finally be around the corner, fingers crossed. Makes me notice things around the house that need to be cleaned and/or thrown out (probably subconscious preparation for spring cleaning).

It makes me wonder. Is that why we clean things? To scrape away the evidence of time's passing around us? To restore our little world to a state that appears new? Is that why we dust and scrub and paint over and replace the components of our microcosms? Are we really so desperate to deny the undeniable?

Everything changes, whether we want it to or not. I suppose that's the trade off isn't it? We lose the things we want but also the things we don't want. Really the best we can ever hope for is that the loss of both comes in somewhat equal measure. Why does it always seem that the harder you try to hold on the easier it all slips away?

The future feels too close these days. Or perhaps, more to the point, I feel unready for it. There's still so much to do. Within and without. Just over the horizon is the place I've been traveling to. It's still a ways off, and it will take some time yet to get there, but it's closer than it has ever been. It fills me with joy and dread. What if I'm not ready when I arrive? I can't stop, mustn't stop, I don't dare. Yet I still feel so unprepared and I know I can't afford to be.

All this makes me almost painfully aware of the passage of time. How much has already passed. How much has yet to pass. I can feel it as a physical thing, not just flowing around me, but flowing out of me, as if there were a finite amount of time stored within me and each passing instant bleeds more of it away. Bleeding time. We're all just wounded animals bleeding time.


J.S.C.
4-12-2020

No comments:

Post a Comment

My photo
Male. Geek. Writes stuff.

The Audience

Archives