And as always in time honoured tradition I sit and attempt to construct words of wisdom. What springs forth is not my age, alas, no. It is the pity that I feel, the disgust and self-loathing that is almost inevitable. Age cannot teach wisdom and yet I will always expect it to. I will hope that my experiences will teach me to shelter from cluster bombs and protect me from crescent kamikazes. But no. Such protection will not be, is not, readily available through the fortune of time.
Time gives me only one thing, a blank sheet of paper on which to choreograph words. Dancing adjectives adjacent to nouns and verbs. The deconstruction of emotions is allowed to stain the passing time that I hold and cherish; and it is this custom of inscription that time will never destroy, because time gave it to me. A gift that time gives cannot be snatched while breath is breathing; only when sighs become silent does this gift leave of its own accord.
Blank sheets drawn upon; decorate minds and memories. Rocks, feathers, wood, lead, plastic ink: the artist’ tools dance to the rhythm of narration. Words pirouette, and sentences form waltzes madly.
History and future, time is frozen by my hand. Time becomes my prisoner of war and forever will it remain while the stained sheets reside in my top desk draw. Yellow and malnourished, these sheets are captured and imprisoned by glass houses, occupied by exhibitionists who prostitute the history and future that I had created, prostituting the time that I stole for myself, and now they display their naked secrets for all to see.
This is how time repays me. Burn those memories while your lungs still exhale recycled chemicals and take your time with you, when your time ends. For when your frozen memories are exhibited in timeless museums your history becomes theirs and your future dies before their eyes.
Those emotions that you had lived through are now in the incarceration of mortal minds, they that will take your random adverbs and use them to their own advantage. The languid love and frail mind that you immortalised is no longer yours but Andrew Johnson’s who will carbonise your history to form his future.
End your time, when time ends you, otherwise your time will belong to Andrew Johnson. Your time will diminish in the present marbled floored room and become a part of Andrew Johnson’s future, while he in his embryonic mind modifies your memories and tints you apple tree shade with colours of his autumn dawn.
Twenty three years of life read your pages in five minutes and absorbs only the clause ‘I wish I had the chance to do it differently.’ While time forgets you, the changes will take place, but your ‘I’ will become his and yet still in eternity will you continue wishing that your time had been lived differently.