Time Waits but Never Stays

A short existential story, which I hope to have illustrated someday :)

Time Waits, But Never Stays.  

   

As a baby, I found beauty to be everything that was novelty. My sense of wonder painted the world in bright, vibrant colors which cast away my fear of the unknown. Everything, given familiarity, was amusing and exciting. I found the funny dark caterpillar under my father’s nose delightful, and even the neighbor's big dog made me laugh. Everything was beautiful and perfect. My world was free of worry and fears. It was not until later that I would find ugly as well.   

As a toddler, I discovered that beauty had an additional dimension, beyond that of sight. Touch. Well…two dimensions if you count chewing. Having just discovered my legs, I could now reach for more. So I would pick up whatever captured my curiosity. I would turn it around, hit it on the floor as I smiled at my panicked parents, and proceed to my favorite part of experience�"the tasting. Often, I would find my reverie rudely interrupted by my parents. They would snatch from me my object of contemplation and replace it with reprimands or warnings. That was when I began to learn about the existence of ugly.   

The ugly came to me in different forms. I learnt that a cat who would scratch me was ugly. That a dying pet was ugly. Even my own mother could be ugly when she yelled or punished me. As I grew, the ugly became more complex and less justified. I found out, as I look back, that every time I thought about what the ugly meant, it became more elusive. And with time, I found new names for it. The one that hung around the longest was suffering.   

This, I believe, is where the state of things became apparent. At first, it was subtle, but with time, it became more evident.    

I was sitting, one day, at a cafeteria. I did not have any music in my ears, nor a screen on which to rest my eyes. I was content in just sitting, watching people in the street walk by. I remember one woman who approached me, clearly confused.   

"Young man, are you all alright?" She asked.   

"Absolutely ma'am. Why do you ask?" I returned, somewhat confused myself.   

"You’re not killing time. You’re not on a phone, or a computer, or a book, or anything. You are sitting and watching the world. This is unusual�"disturbing. You’re not killing time,” she offered, her quizzical expression amusing me.   

"Madam, I am part of a counter-cultural movement," I told her. "I am a defender of the uncommon sense.” The lady was not amused, but little did she know that I had offered her the answer of a lifetime's worth of pondering.   

Suffering is everywhere and seems to be in everything. Even the most joyful moments of our lives are painted with some degree of pain�"if not at the time of the experience, certainly at the recollection of it, and realization that it is now in the past. So, I wondered: Would a god allow humans to constantly be in pain? I do not know the answer to that question, but I know that we as a society have created one to save us. I call him Morpheus, the God of Sleep.    

When I was a teenager, I did not fit well with other kids. At first, I was too fat. Then too smart. Then too angry. Then too aggressive. Life seemed unworthy of my time. I tried to find better ways to kill time before I would let myself be consumed by my pain. Isolation from my surroundings was not the only pain I felt during those days. Other pains that assailed me were the memories of my innocence being taken away too soon. These memories would be followed by the perpetual violation of my childhood and by those who should have been my friends. My parents never knew; I never told them. It was enough then for me to simply keep these thoughts to myself.    

The memories were like storms on the sea. I would be surprised by the sudden rush of them, and they would leave me barely afloat in my own mind once they were gone. The damages numbed me, and I began to seek refuge elsewhere than my own life.   

When your eyes are in pain, everything you look at becomes painful. It is not the world that is necessarily hurting your eyes, but the pain within them paints the world in tragic hues. So too, my self-loathing, hurt, and anger were burning with such a passion in my eyes, that wherever I looked, they were all I saw. Ugly, everything was ugly.   

Morpheus came to me when I had decided that my life would be better if I didn't live it. In those days, I might spend the hours numbing my mind to escape the vicious persecution of my sanity. When I fantasized on an alternate life, I would be at peace. When I saw another me being able to stretch his wings and fly as high as they would take him, my heart was stilled. But reveries would not suffice. Soon, my escape would become video games, or meaningless pleasurable pursuits�"alcohol, drugs, anything to distance myself from my awareness, was good enough.   

I was a young adult then and didn't realize the passing of time. Sporadic interventions would come my way. My friends would vainly attempt to help me out, but I never noticed. I was drugged emotionally. I numbed my empathy, my ambitions, and my capacity at wondering. I was a shell, and I lied to myself to get out of bed.    

One day, I sat in the bus, riding home. That night, I thought, would be my last one; I would join Morpheus once and for all. Ironically, when one attempts to leave this world behind, there is a moment of sobriety in which the person looks back at the world, almost as if to reevaluate whether this life is really worth leaving. This decisive moment is enough for some to step down from the bridge, but to others it's the pull on the trigger. To me, it was looking up from my phone at the faces in the bus, only to see that every face was my own.   

The terror that struck me is almost impossible to describe. I realized then that I had thrown ugly colors on everything. My world was only shades of grey, occasionally accentuated with hints of black. It was a neutral, unenticing, empty image. People's faces were blurred, and scenes blended one into another without distinction. Then I caught a vision from the past, a memory. I remembered how much joy  I felt when my father would twitch his mustache left and right. What had happened to my sense of wonder?   

I threw my phone down, darted to the door, and jumped off the bus at the nearest station. Outside the bus, the world was entirely grey and formless. The more I tried to discern the shapes, the more they fused. The grey turned into darkness, and as I ran desperately after the dying of the light, my world plunged into darkness.   

And there I was. Lost in my pain. Darkness was all there was. I couldn't feel anything other than fear. Fear that I was alone, shunned. That I had become the world's own ugliness.    

Time ceased to exist.   

Days, nights, would come and go, but I would be oblivious. I was content just lying in my misery and letting myself waste away.   

Suddenly, memories of my youth began to save me. I remember asking the void surrounding me, "Why do you treat me so?" Slowly, wonder made its first appearance in my life. Like a star in the night, awe was the shimmering light that broke the darkness. Curious, I tried to reach for it and became a toddler again. Learning to walk, learning to discover. I crawled towards the light and begged it to save me. Finally, it did. At the end of the light was a mirror, and I saw myself in it. I was old, frail, beaten, and ready to die. My life was gone, but I had rediscovered what it meant to be curious, even if only for a few more hours.  

I opened my eyes, and the darkness was gone. I was back in the world of the living and realized I was on a death bed�"my death bed. Engulfed in pain as I had been, my life had drifted by without my noticing. I had finally learned to love life, but now it would be definitely taken away from me. In dying, I began to find life, and the emotions pushed my heart to beat faster.    

I cried. The tears warmed my cheeks, and my eyes poured out more of this burning liquid. In those tears were the poison that I’d kept in my heart all these years. I was finally letting go of it, and colors crept into my world once again. My death was beautiful, as I began to feel childlike. I was moving on to the next world and did not know what to expect. Everything would be new.   

My sense of wonder now had reclaimed me. The world was colorful, and everything was beautiful. The colors on the screens of the monitors, the bandages, the white blanket. In its minimalistic way, each had a story to tell.    

I stared at the monitor, and watched the lines jumping up and down. With each jump, the progression became slower, and the lines more spaced out.    

One two.    

I smiled with joy. The pain was ending and the colors would carry me on.   

One, two.   

Remembering my father's mustache brought a smile to my cracked lips once again.   

 One; two.   

I now understood. Time waits but never stays.   

 One.   

  

 

 

Author's Note

Critics highly appreciated :)