Faust
This is yesterday, welcome to limbo.
This is tomorrow - the month, the year, the decade after tomorrow. This is after the game, this is the washup, it's all finished and the old men in the zip-up jackets and old-man shorts are walking around the oval with garbage bags, scooping up hot chip cartons and streamers with vital but disapproving hands.
This is the flashback, the rewind in the movie - we'll review events and try to change the course of time, try to bandage up and redeem the story
before it's too late.
This was then,
and that is you:
over there.
Moving without purpose and lost among the twisting textures and diorama of the horizon. Shale, Shells, Slate, Gravel - there you are drifting in and out, hugging the rocks with desperate palms as you clamber your way up the ridge.
Now you're lower, down in the valley with your hair waving in the corridor of wind. That trembling stick in the water is you, the lone figure in the Xi Jiang river with pant-legs rolled to your knees. You've found a bank to stand on with a blackened log to protect your little island, but the silt is trailing through your hands and it won't be long before you're dragged away by the current.
Don't stop, don't lag: fatigue is tugging you at your sleeve - despair, apathy, drunken lethargy, the elements, oxidization, fossilisation, obscurity, obfuscation, disease.
None of these matter, they are galaxies and flux, they are gases and rivers carving new courses into themselves, swallowing their own flesh to spawn new promises, to reinvent ideas that will run parallel with your own for thousands of miles, a million light years, an impossible distance. Press on, surge forward, run onward.
Now we are in Manila, Chicago, Michigan, a level crossing between endless fields in Illinois, Karakatoa, Bromo, Merapi, Merbabu, Calcutta - there's Mount Hood through a blanket of rain, there's Catalina Island shimmering in the distance before our eyes give way to sleep. There's the August moon high above where we lay.
There's the day we first met. There's our first unconscious touch of hands, there's our first fight, our first kiss, the day when I lost you, the day one year later when we ran into each other again in the Mexican restaurant and we didn't know whether this was fate or simply good quesadillas. Are you prepared to give up yet?
Singapore in the afternoon thunderstorms, Beijing on the first day of snow for the year, Alabama on the train, lost in Bangkok at four years old and crying for your dad to find you, Los Angeles at dusk when all the streets seemed to menace, Toronto at midnight when the air was frozen with promise, wobbling down College Street drunk, roaming the streets of Minneapolis in a blizzard -
Staring down into the Mississippi river with sad and tired eyes, never knowing what you were looking at.
You're tired, exhausted, destroyed, you need a hammock to rest in. But time is coming for you, there's no time for sleep, no time for weakness or relenting.
This is the last train and you have to be on it.
This is your last chance and nobody else cares if you grab it.
This is last call and you can't have a drink later.
It's now - now or never.
Now is today and tomorrow and forever, it's next week and in a minute.
It's all there is, It's all that you have.
There's no time to decide.
Time has made your decisions for you.
Wake up.