Time. Where Does It Go?

Time. Where does it go?

He wondered this, sitting on the bus, a slow, awkward thing amongst the lanes of quick, darting cars. The floor of the bus was an unattractive rusty orange-brown color, peppered with black-and-white specks.

He wondered if time draped her softly gleaming shroud over each person like a second skin when they born. A skin that was perpetually falling and flaking and scraping off, becoming but ugly little flecks on bus floors. And never growing back. Once you ran out, you ran out. Perhaps that was why, when you grew old, you always felt so naked, so naked and frail and cold.

The wearing-down began with the soles of your feet, suffering from all the places you’ve been, pained from the places you will never get to be no matter how long you wait. And your hands, the things you’ve done. Pointing, waving, writing, caressing. Murdering and masturbating. All of it.

Time. Where does she go? He wondered this; oh, how he wondered.

And one day, he was determined to find out. He fashioned himself a silver crown and a silver sword like the old heroes on their yellowed pages (though he hoped he wouldn’t need to use the sword). Boarding a bus traversing the great desert, he had with him no luggage but his odd, childish, aching desire. He knew not what exactly he was looking for, but he knew he would know once he laid eyes on it.

They showed a movie on the bus, and though the ending wasn’t terribly sad, he wept nonetheless. Then, the little yellow reading lights up and down the bus flickered out like weary fireflies. He stayed awake, treading water in a small sea of sleeping breaths.

The next day, they were at the ocean, a peculiar, roaring thing that stretched to the end of all anyone knew. He had never seen the ocean; he knew not what an ocean even was. The embittered, rearing waves dashed against rocks, sending cloaks of spray into the air, and the atmosphere was flavored like a dish with salt and all the mad freeness. And oh, how the rays of sun exerted their terpsichorean prowess in myriad silver flashes and arcs over the surface of the great, bizarre expanse.

His eyes filled with tears at the sight - Time and her million nymphs. He ran, desperate and stumbling, over the rocky ground toward this magnificent thing. Ran until the ground fell away under him. And then, he too fell - it lasted both a very long and a very short time, the duration of which he could not discern upwards from down, nor right from left.

And his fall was at last broken, two more glints of silver inside the ebbing, flowing mass.