You wake up one morning and you’re 70 years old. You see clearly that life is terrifying and fleeting. You find yourself in a world where kids don’t know how to ride a bike or tell time on an analog clock. You’re not sure you want to be here. You tell yourself this, too, will all change, that the pendulum will swing back within your lifetime. Children will once again build forts in empty lots and put away their devices long enough to sing silly songs with their friends. You tell yourself there is plenty of time left. You see yourself traveling, thinking great thoughts, and falling in love. But you know better, of course. You know your time for chasing your passions is nearing an end.

Maybe not today or tomorrow. Maybe not in ten years. But if you’re going to read that book or take that class, you know the hour is now. Because everything is happening at once, as if the steady, syncopated passage of time has flattened and evaporated. The knowledge is frightening and disconcerting. You struggle to keep your head above the ethereal waters. You enter a state of foolish, unspoken denial. If you’re lucky, you might have ten years left, perhaps even twenty. You tell yourself that’s not nearly enough, but you cling to it anyway. It does, as they say, beat the alternative.

Are you happy?
You go about your business as a normal woman who nurtures her plans and dreams and does as she pleases from day to day without undue regard for each precious second as it ticks away inexorably. Friends and family are falling by the wayside. The world as you know it no longer exists. In its place is a surreal landscape of nearly-but-not-quite-familiar people and places. Some remind you of people you once knew or places you have visited. But none of them are precisely the same. They morph under your gaze into alien objects threatening your sense of reality. You play along. You act as if all this is normal and rational. You can’t decide whether the truth has changed or just your ragged perceptions of truth. And, under these dire circumstances, the latter is far more threatening.

No one else notices anything is wrong. Or maybe they do notice. Perhaps they are trying to fool you as you are trying to fool them. No one speaks of it. Not one person will admit that what was here yesterday is gone today, that in its place is an elaborate facsimile of your time in Italy, your love for reading, and your children’s smiles. The faces of your loved ones are the most treacherous of all. A chubby baby for an instant, and now a middle-aged woman. A devoted spouse, now only one more lost love. A circle of friends picked off one by one until, if you are fortunate, only a couple remain. You’d better hurry. Embrace your grandchildren if you have any. Fall in love again if you can. Go back to Rome no matter what. Do anything to cultivate those rare moments before they slip away completely.

You feel yourself the victim of an elaborate, cosmic hoax. Everyone is conspiring against you – if everyone exists at all. In short, it’s hard to know precisely what is real. Common sense tells you that you are floating in a dream from which you may or may not awaken. After all, what you are experiencing is becoming more and more fantastic. The times of your life have sped up and surpassed you in the blink of an eye. Trips. Children. Marriages. Careers. They no longer belong to you but exist in some bizarre netherworld of strange yet familiar details. We call it memory. We call it the past. Whatever we call it, no one else remembers it precisely as we do, so we begin to suspect it is all an elaborate fantasy of our own making.

Someone is lying. You can’t argue with a fact. Or perhaps the very definition of what is real is open to disagreement. Some parts of it must be unassailable. That only makes the whole pill easier to swallow. You have one child whom you love. Correct. That child is happy and prosperous. Possibly true. She understands you deeply. But you can never know. Who trusts you? Who loves you? Who would travel to the end of the earth for you? Someone? Everyone? No one? You can’t waste more time thinking about those questions. They are so essential and yet irrelevant in this new state of being, even after spending a lifetime pursuing their proof. Live in the now. It’s all you have left. The future has been stolen from you, and the past probably never existed.

But are you happy?
It’s a trick question. Or perhaps it’s a non-question. The only answer is ‘yes,’ and you must go on from there. What it means is, have you resigned yourself to the ridiculously short human lifespan? Have you accepted the near-completion of your time on earth? Are you ready to break the hearts of those who love you? You can’t disagree. It would be futile and unproductive. You can only go with the flow. You can only embrace the split second you have left.

Next year I will travel to an exotic land. I will refine my objectives and make elaborate plans. I will get on the plane, clad in familiar excitement and practical footwear. The trip will be fun, I tell myself, and so the scene will play itself out. I will be there momentarily, sleeping in uncomfortable beds, seeing the sights, eating the food, and conversing with strangers. Then, I will be home again, remembering, and sharing the experience with others. Did I ever really set foot there, or was it just an illusion? A single tick of the clock is all we get. And we’d better be damned satisfied with that.

Forget time. It doesn’t exist. We are all timeless, all eternal. We are. That’s what you have to remember. Life isn’t a fight against the clock. It’s a privilege and a celebration to be here, to be anywhere. So, glory in it. It’s all the same whether for ten, fifty, or a hundred years. Cause some noise. Take up space. Make bold choices and take chances. Fly high. You are defined by what remains when your moment is over. And that has to be enough.

I am still working on the splash I will have made when my years are at an end. I continue to refine my story, featuring certain events, shading some, and omitting others altogether, although ultimately the editing will be done by the people I leave behind. They will tell our stories and hear our wisdom, if there is any to be heard. They will gather instruction and perhaps even inspiration from all we have done before them. That is their work, and we must not concern ourselves unduly with the messages we leave in our wake.

Then, again, a familiar figure passes you by, slips past like a stranger in a crowded elevator, featureless and unregarded. It is your life. It is the time it takes to travel from birth to the grave. Acknowledge it if you can, try to nod perfunctorily, and smell its cologne as it sidles past you apologetically. One day, that perception of scant interaction is all you will have left. The figure will have moved on in that instant, ambled nonchalantly around a corner and down some stairs, going about its anonymous business never to be glimpsed again.

Sing, if you can. Dance a crooked jig. Desperation is all there is. That, and a ragged sense of melancholy over it all.

You must be happy because you have reached the end, having tasted victory in a small cup with only scant dregs of regret. So, this is the secret. It is to avoid the bitter tang of too many foolish missteps, too many ill-conceived decisions, too much misguided passion, and not enough love. Mostly, the love. That is what feeds us and keeps us afloat through it all.

So, on that dreadful morning when you awaken suddenly at seventy, you realize your life has occurred in a single day. There was the morning, when dew wet the carpet of fresh grass, the afternoon, the evening, and finally the blackness of a starless night. And it would be like trying to measure smoke to make sense of it. It flows through your fingers. You can look at it. But it cannot be held. Life is transitory. Life is eternal.

 

Linda Caradine is an award-winning Portland, Oregon, writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including TRP. She is currently working on a novel.