Dear Time,

I’ve been trying to catch up to you for a longish stretch now. You got away from me a bit ago – what happened there? Was it in Nashville where we shared so many deadlines; where you became a steeplechase run at full gallop, full of fences & water hazards but where you mainly surfaced as Total Taskmaster?

Was that where I pushed back from the table, starving & sated both? Was it where I first perceived your importance & indifference (& impotence)? For surely at that time, you started to slip now having lost traction altogether.

(If Time were a racehorse, it was riding me with a brutal bit bruising my mouth. Foolish with faux power & authority, I was fooled into feeling in charge.)

Now you spin on your own axis. Now you wobble along scarcely missing other planets. I ride your edge but am no longer certain of my own boundaries. I have seen too much, heard too much; bled too much, lied too hard. I knew no better at the time.

Forgive me?

Can we be friends? Can we drop the Master/Slave relationship? I just can’t hold on that tightly anymore. Times have changed, hell, we both have. Boundaries & dynasties blur as I grasp for my place within these. I arrive to find I stand in the center of the Hall of Mirrors.

One by one my systems fail your tests. Words burrow under the surface when I try to speak them. Ideas change color or come so clear as to be invisible when I rely on them thinking these individualistic & whole.

And, Time, what have we wrought with the physical? Good grief! I so miss being beautiful, moving fluidly, the casual fearlessness. Hesitation becomes caution, caution a transparency of hesitation. Hey, I don’t mind mortality – I mean, we all die to the third dimension as we move into others. Perhaps I find that much-touted stance of Youth just plain boring now.

I like my wisdom. I enjoy filtering all you teach me through experience. I am certain of less & less. You, too, have lost certitude & lack surety.

Okay, this is how it is: I started this thinking to point out how far in the lead I am, or you are. But I now see we are so intertwined…walking together, neither leading, both leaning into each other.

I left at arrival & still search a destination only to find the walk is all there is.