How much time is quantifiably “enough?” How long SHOULD things take… or how long do we want them to last? Time is happening, but, I find, individual perceptions of it vary greatly. Including my own, within my own life.

I found something on the internet while clinging desperately hope and scouring for words and images of my past. I found some text and read it, from 6 years ago on Christmas… It was the spark of something powerful, frozen in time). A check-in from a previously unremembered interval that seems now more like decades ago. My chronologic sense of this period, not the same as memory, is vastly different from the actual measured steps of days recorded. Things were accelerating towards a peak in these words, glowing and radiant. I feel far removed from parallels or similarity now, but the hurt of it is still near…

What I think my askew sense of time shows is that it doesn’t take long for our lives to change. In the years since that note, I’ve fundamentally reprioritized, changed professions, passions, goals, and embraced a new reality that works for equilibrium in my present environment. I look back and both sigh with awe, and swallow hard knowing what dark days lie ahead. When I reflected, I thought about how many things I had yet to learn, and how fundamental a reboot I would receive in the years to come.

During the decay after that peak, things seemed agonizingly drawn-out, but smeared and indiscernible, like grease on drywall. Such distant turbulence is hard to accurately document with memory, but little glimmers like this one remind me that, regardless of outcome, it started the right way. I had forgotten, but the origin was well intended, innocent, pure, impulsive and magnetic. It was like a dream, but I didn’t work nearly enough to make sure it stayed beautiful, and we fell into decay.

A gift from the past, but one that carries the weight and responsibility of reality. I am a creepy stalker asshole whatever to go sniffing around… but my heart is broken and I don’t have enough ways of coping that channel my emotions productively, apparently. I look for her words somewhere out there, with an ill-fated desire seeking an alternative reality that doesn’t exist. I know it isn’t hiding on some website, waiting to be found, which rends me even more. There is no end, only an ongoing state of realized, unrequited incompleteness… and our remembered laughter echoes down the long hallway of time, reaching my ears as little more than screams.

I must resolve of my own accord, and in a time that suits me best.