The Quandary of Time

By Brian Elroy McKinley

Time wounds my soul. It eats, like an earthworm, through my memories and desecrates my most fond melancholy emotions. Time may give me the dimension in which I can grow, but daily it robs me of the sweetness I crave.
As I drive down the now paved road that leads to my grandmother's house, I see a boy, this boy, playing in the mud. There, in that empty field where my grandmother's former house once stood, I see me as a little boy, dirty and smiling in my overly long shorts, playing soldier in the mud, wishing I were all grown up. But in front of me is only a weed covered field, and my grandmother has long since moved on. Time has taken that place from me now.
As I drive past the Navy base where my earliest memories were formed, I can see, along the strangely deserted roads that outline where row's of military houses once were, a boy, this boy, playing in the dirt and on the sidewalks, riding his bike and breaking his leg in a crash. Yes, right there. He's the little boy with the dirty hair and baggy shirt. He laughs as he plays with the many children that lived along these same roads. Strange, it is, to drive these streets and feel my own spirit living, now, in a ghost town.
As I visit my sister-in-law's grave, I stand for just a moment, but Elaine is not there. No, and yet her headstone seems to fill, ever so slightly, that naked void created by her cancerous death. Next to her grave is my grandfather's. Having died this summer, there is not yet even a headstone to soothe my wounded mind. I can hear his voice, almost as if I'm overhearing a conversation between he and Elaine. Mentally I know it's not tenable, but the voice in my spirit still makes it so. Where once they were present, now to me, they are gone. I may talk at their grave sites all day, yet I can never again have the kind of conversations we held when they were living. Time has created a wall, a barrier that separates me from those I love.
When last I was in San Diego I visited my brother, Steve's, grave. It's been fourteen years since he took his own life, fourteen years since I've been able to talk with him, fourteen years since he removed himself from us by stepping off that tree limb and stepping out of time. I wonder what he would be had he not died. I wonder what adventures we would, together, add to our existence. I wonder how one more touch from his long, narrow fingers would comfort me. But no. Time takes away my blood and fills my veins with fluid sorrow.
I watch the ticking of the clock. Minute by minute goes by, and I'm aware of my mind's hold on the present. For a few minutes my faculty is not remembering the past, nor looking to the future, but it is experiencing only the very present. Creeping like a scorpion, waiting to force its penetrating sting into my brain, a thought comes to mind. This moment, I think, will never happen again. I may return to this spot. I may do it at precisely the same time of day on the same day of the year, but I will have only recreated the events surrounding that moment. I will not have returned to that time. Sting after sting pierces my brain as the understanding of the full implications of time brings darkness, anger. My little boy is gone. He will never exist again. The yard where he played is gone. He cannot sit in the mud and feel that experience again. My brother and my sister-in-law and my grandfather are gone. I cannot visit them or recreate the times I've had with them or capture a moment of what it was like when they were here.
Sorrow then, to think of the nature of time. It pushes me forward when I want to stay. If forces me to say goodbye when I want only hello's. To go somewhere necessitates I leave somewhere because each place that holds my footprints exists not only in the three dimensions of space but in the fourth dimension of time. When I get on a plane to visit friends in Ireland, I must travel through space and time to get there. I, therefore, cannot both stay with my wife and visit my friends simultaneously. You may say it is the distance that separates us, but rather, it is the time. If there were no time, then I could be both in Colorado and in Ireland at the same moment.
When dealing with the formulas for the very motion that creates life, how often I wish we could delete time from the equation. Since distance divided by time equals motion, if we could make time equal zero, then the outcome of the equation would be zero. Six thousand miles of distance, divided by zero time is zero motion. Since without time we could travel without moving, travel at the speed of will, I could be here and 6000 miles away simultaneously. If there were not time, then I could indeed return to my childhood days and live again those emotions. If there were not time, then my family members could move into death but still be here since past, present and future would all exist concurrently. Without time I could be at my own birth, and shovel dirt on my own casket because all the manifestations of my life, and of the lives of my loved ones, would co-exist. We could all be together always, and be anywhere in the world all at the same time, or non-time. Saying hello would not necessarily mean saying goodbye.
Therefore I will direct my venom against this most sour of dimensions. For in my moment of sorrow I can taste no sweetness, no tenderness, no fragrant hope that time brings. Rather, I struggle with loss and deprivation.
And yet, in my loss a concession need be mentioned. If time existed not, and once something existed it always existed because the past would be the future and the future would be now, then a peculiar phenomenon would ensue. Once we made a decision, we would never be able to change our mind. With no time, each choice would be forever, forcing us to deal with the good and bad of our decisions without recourse to change them. If our choices are good, we may indeed think timelessness wonderful (which I think it indeed would be except for this haunting applicability), but what fright, it would be, to think the cretin could never escape his foolish choices with newer, better ones. Even if he made a new choice (the word "new" here doesn't really apply since it is a time-related word), it would exist equally with the bad one. Therefore, I must concede, in my timeless world there would be no room for repentance. What you have been is always what you will be, and the reverse is also true. It must, therefore, be reckoned that the one aspect of time that keeps me from wreaking my most vicious of criticisms upon it is that without time in the equation of life none of us would ever be able to change our minds. Redemption from ourselves would be impossible.
Still, I raise my sword at the rising sun and curse the path of existence that forces us to say goodbye. What a wretched scourge of a word, "goodbye," except when saying goodbye to the refuse my wake has sometimes left. In the curl of those errant waves, goodbye is not a sorrow but a necessity. For in this world I fail and hurt and sin. I curse and maim and destroy. I need the very redemption that only this wretched time can precipitate. Whether I'd have needed this cursed time had Adam not condemned his race to be born greedy and ignoble I cannot, for a moment, know, but sadly for me, we do not still live in what must have been a timeless Garden of Eden.
Sadly, also, for me, I cannot test my illusion of the gaiety of timelessness, for the fabric of my existence is firmly woven on the loom of time. The very needle that pierces my brain with the sting of loss and deprivation is the needle that mends together the motion necessary for life; for life is motion. Every caress, every stride, every meal, every breath, every nerve impulse, every DNA division, every electron's orbit, every atom's ability to maintain the energy of living requires motion. To not move is to die, and to live is to sometimes suffer the scourge of goodbye's. What then, is my recourse?
My question is my answer. For recourse is dependent upon taking a different path, a path of my own choosing. This very time that wounds my soul and sets my anger against it is the tool I must use to choose in which streets I will dwell. This very time that forces me to move forward also creates the freedom to decide where that forward will take me. God on high, I see what you have done. When, before, you gave us life without choices, without responsibility, without the bitter sting of goodbye, we now, most assuredly due to our own undoing, must live within the paintings we, ourselves, paint. Each new moment, I now see, gives us the option to paint darkness or light. I can choose to wallow in my own sorrow until it clots in my veins, bringing a death I would with open arms welcome, or I can choose to fill each new moment, and consequently my veins, with the fascination, joy, hope and worship that also wrap their shoulders within the shawl of time.
Time wounds me; this is true, and upon its existence I heap hostility. But if I turn my bleeding face toward the ground and cover my head in the mud of freshly buried moments, if I fail to take the choices afforded me by the needed existence of a past then I will have allowed the sorrow of time to rob me of all the possible joy that is offered me by a future. And if I let my anger over goodbye's cause my hind eyes to be blinded, then I will also fail to see the great joys of my many past hello's. Even as time can rob me of sweetness, of tenderness, of fragrant moment morsels, it also lends me the tools to make my soured harvest into wine, a process that, though I may not like it, takes time.

Email: el@elroy.com

Go Back to The Event Horizon Rider