Life in Real Time

There are times when I don’t know how to feel anymore. Right and wrong are one and the same to me. Once, I knew how to feel so well. At that moment in my budding maturity, life was but two colours; black and white. One day though, some villain or other informed me that black was the absence of colour. This same reaper of truth said to me that white is not even a colour at all. Shortly after this incident, I couldn’t see at all. Things just became foggy.



I stare at the clock on my pale yellow wall. These seconds breed and somehow sprout decades. It is elusive time, however, that will perplex me until my time’s end. I yearn to hold time. I do not mean I wish to stop it, or accomplish some farce of time travel; I just want to reach out and touch it. I think that is where I will find truth.



I have searched and waited for it my entire life, and I know that I would have seen it by now, staring back at me from a pale yellow wall. It would have come to me, devout lover that I am.



I must confess, however, that my love was not always unrequited. There was a night, long ago, when I experienced the bliss of loving union. The incident has faded from my memory greatly, so much so that I only feel its timid imprint upon the joints between my bones. Those joints conducted me, mobilised me, toward my lover’s outstretched arms. Arms that could turn full circle.



It was these joints of mine that tell the tale of the truth. As I painfully pace inside the place of my bodily residence, enclosed by pale yellow walls, I allow my joints to move my bones in the same way I did then, in the arms of time. I begin to turn, to the right, to the left, one step, then two. The wind that howls in the distance and taps on my window has decided to play the tune. With socks on my feet I twirl, the carpet causing me to slip slightly, my joints, sustaining themselves, continue to take me back. We danced across the clouds that night, we danced above the sea. Beneath me I could see the world, aglow. Time swept me from city to city, country to country, in our eternal nightfall. The velvet waters looked as if they had never known disturbance, never known affliction. Time led me here.



The night was not yet to end. Truth had only just begun to emerge from its melancholia. Entwined and safely wrapped in the arms of time, my body circled the world, my mind never staying with me, my eyes thirsty for more. There was a small fishing boat, out at sea, its country of origin unknown to me. I did not know where we were. But I was there, in the sky, hiding behind a cloud that was just out of the moonshine. From there I watched the little boat.



The boat was probably no bigger than the two men sitting in it. Each man had an arm’s length from the edge, and they sat in the middle, their backs to each other. It seemed that they had quarrelled. I could tell from the way the water was lapping about the sides of the boat. They appeared to be very different from one another, yet they looked exactly the same. I wanted to ask them what had happened, why they sat like that, but time bade me to be silent. I assented. Each man was holding a fishing rod, his face turned towards the night sky. One even looked at a star to my right, but did not catch sight of me.



Suddenly dialogue began.



“Did you see her?” said the man facing my direction.

I felt my heart pound one beat a little too forcibly.

“Does it matter?” said the other man.

They were both wearing white.

“I’d like to think not, but we both know better than that,” replied the first man.

He was wearing a black cap that he decided to remove at that moment. He wiped his brow while securing the fishing rod between his knees.

“Well I did see her. Then I wished I hadn’t.”

I saw the velvet they had pierced begin to change texture. I think there were ripples in the black now.

“She needs you.”



The man with the cap had returned it to his head, and was now in a struggle. He had caught onto something.



The other man jumped up, the unexpected struggle urging him to help his friend. But then he stood there and watched while the other man reeled in his prize. The captor turned to his friend, tossed the fish to the floor of the boat and solemnly took his seat again. His resolve was apparent. The other man took a seat beside him; they were both facing me now. I was restless, but time hushed my whispers of protest.



“I am sorry,” muttered the cap-less companion.

“I know, but I gave up all the same.”



Upon hearing this, time moved. Time moved so quickly I could barely see.



I blinked, then blinked again, and again, but could not find what I needed to see. I looked toward the little boat. The velvet was more than unsettled, it had folded over the tiny vessel and I could see two white specks sinking into the black. They were gone. Or almost gone, either way, I knew that time had sought them out. Time had destroyed them both. I wiped the tears from my eyes with my bare arm, as a gust of bitter wind howled at me. The howling grew and rose to meet me in my hiding place, forcing me into a most inconsolable state. I swung my arms about me, trying to fight it off, trying to fling the sound away, as robustly as I could. This made me lose my footing. I slipped on the carpet again, my joints not sustaining me this time. I fell forward, my arms out before me, smashing through my window. I wobbled back, just feeling pain. A slow burn that ran from the outermost tips of my fingers, along my blood streaked arms and ignited my rib cage. I was lit, aglow with flames. They rose to my tear streaked face and I looked through the haze. My walls never looked so bright, the seconds drowned out by the storm.