PART 39

When I was around 6 years old my mother asked me what time was. Maybe she was having an off day or maybe she was just trying to amuse herself on a long car ride with just the two of us. What is time? Turns out… this monstrous question laid down at the feet of my adolescent self because I apparently immediately answered her. “Time is change.” I mutter this response to her from my uncomfortably small car seat. She makes me repeat it. “Time is change.” It’s probably the only sensible thing I’ve ever said in my entire life.

Today is day full of 1’s (11/11/11) and I awoke thinking about my younger self. Starting at 21. The older I get… the more 21 gets stuck in my head. No weird hairs. No small gut you have to fight off like wild animals after the scent of an injured colleague. Everything was stupid and I pretended to know more than I did and love was hilarious and terrifying. Then high school. 16 I guess. I think I was a nice kid. I took pictures with my grandfather’s old camera. I cleaned land of broken trees for money. I smoked cigars at night and was nice to my friends and kind to girls I didn’t know. And then Jr. High. Everyone is lost. Everyone wants to be someone else. No one knows anything real about themselves and they take it out on each other. It’s like a social experiment gone horribly wrong. Before that was my parents creating a happy child hood for me. From 1 to 10ish I was Peter Pan. I was James and the Giant Peach. I was a savage creation that tore through the ice covered limbs of a Neverland that I myself created. Everything was a ray gun or a dinosaur bone or a mystic sign or a vampire tooth. Nothing was out of control. I would destroy or save entire universes and then come home safe and happy to my father’s jokes and my mother’s patience.

And nothing stops and no one has a say about it. We’re on a train that has derailed. It’s consistently increasing in speed and we sit by tiny, frosted windows and watch the monumental moments of our life fly by with no regard. The train runs through the walls of a small town and twenty years have gone by. An old man asks me for my ticket and my children are grown. I am grown. And the only consistent thread that runs through it all is that nothing ever stays the same. It’s always moving and changing. And the minute you think you have it under control… you realize that you are stranger in a strange land. And all I can encourage you to do is unbuckle your car seat, ask your mother to sit in the passenger seat, take the wheel, and love that strange land while you can.