The Now

Here is now, waiting for you. It may not be quite the now you were looking for all those years ago when you set out on your journey to look for that time you could call your own. Back then, you lived the time carved by others: parents, teachers, adults and your young friends. Back then, you didn’t even know that one day you would be alone with your own time, wondering what to do with it. Back then, you didn’t even think about time that much, except noticing how schooldays dragged and the weekends were always over far too soon, descending almost immediately into that Sunday evening torpor when the threat of the week ahead grew huge in the mind, growing claws, teeth and talons ready to rip you away from all that mattered to you.

Then, though, slowly, all those other times faded away, leaving you here looking at this now you hold in your hand as you wonder what to do with it, realise every time you glance down at it, it has grown smaller, lost more of its shine and sparkle. There was a time when you almost held the whole world in your hand and the now filled that world, pulsing with bright possibilities. Now all you have is this one small now, pulsing with a fading light that you know one day will grow dark and then disappear.