Time

There are days when I feel as if time were rushing around me, as if I were a rounded stone in a mountain stream. Those days everything seems to move so quickly and when I try to jump and flow with the current I trip and the words come out of my mouth in a jumbled ball that only attracts derisive laughter. And then there are days when I am a particle from that stone, torn from the essence that I feel is me, tumbling and crashing into new people and places and things, running as fast as I can and feeling as if I am staying only just ahead of the hurdles I have to jump. And then there are days when time isn't, when I can become so engrossed in something and look up to find that hours have passed, that dinner has come and gone and I start moving to joints complaining of being left in one position for too long.

There is time in a sense of placement, as in a time for this or that or that other thing way over yonder or wait, your time will come. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of imagining the future, of longing for what I don't have. Not in a material sense, but in a sense of fulfillment, in knowing that I've done something worthwhile to me, that I mean something to someone else. I want time to be like wafting on the Eno, like floating in a lazy relaxing river. I want to get to the end of my river in one piece, not in several small bits eroded from myself and waiting for the rest of my life to arrive. I want to have changed something, to have left some mark on my river, to have made the banks free of litter and the flora and fauna thrive. I want to have loved, and to have been loved, to have been intertwined with another soul, another river, another person's time.

Why a river? I don't know. Perhaps because water is the opposite of fire.