Time is an Illusion

—flash fiction about the paradox

I stand on the beach. 

I stand in my kitchen. 

I am with you. 

I am without you. 

Solve this riddle for me and tell me where you went from my side—still beside me all the while. You quit and you came and it all repeats in ways that I cannot comprehend. 

I wait with you. 

I wait for your return. 

We await the results. The sand blends into the carpet, bleeds into the hardwood, breaks into the cracked concrete. Walk inert. Be driven forth by a lack of motion or answer. 

Where have you gone? 

You are here. 

Errors in your understanding. Miscreant recreation of what once was. 

You went.

I remember you here. 

Babbling on from the cliff’s edge, awaiting the leap and the dismay of fear. This held you back, kept you here even as you were leaving. 

We yawed away only to never be seen again. A nosedive toward the inverse ocean floor. 

“What are we meant to be?” 

You asked as if I knew the answer. 

As if I had any sense of the direction we were traveling through, these troubled days both halcyon and august, morose and hopeful; draining ourselves of loyalty until we are mere hull and husk. The nonsense of knowing. I wouldn’t speak but I said it all the same: all moments in a microcosm. You here and you are away, bent backward through a flow of memory to see what erosion led us to this bifurcated moment and how close we came to becoming aware. 

They know and They listen. Attempts to grow as we wilt within.

The confinement of Allthings—the truest secondary loss gone in a flash to gain. 

I sit in the rocking chair, you are the fire keeping me warm: an exultation of the mass and energy of the axial grind, you are true to me even in the lies we extricate. Abetting the fallow troughs and letting the animals die even as we waned, abdicated beyond all doubt regarding the mystery that grew ever more invisible, the puzzle we lost within the black-bottomed cube that grew in our garden, that grows in your heart. 

We are tired of being wide awake and aware, terror and power moving through the record’s groove as we slow and reverse to find an unknown truth: the darkened catacomb, the needle point of light. 

There you are, gone forever as you breathe deep and turn away. Weary. I am dim with your brilliance, smothered by the moths adoring your light, begging for even a modicum of your warmth gone now leaving only your brightness to fade. You are torn apart in a way that resembles togetherness. 

I stand and I sit and I may and I must.

You revolve around the sun unceasing. 

I await a return on the beach, in the kitchen. You maintain your position next to me in these troubled caroms through our memories and what once was, wiped away by the effervescent attempt to see beyond the spectrum, a cold light held long after.

⥁⥀⥁