Rarely viewed as the villain

Until, of course, the victims

realize it really is

Time gives us an opportunity

try everything

once

Time gives us the chance to

succeed

as often as we want

So, how is Time the villain?

Time is insidious

Gradually eroding

Our body

Our mind

Our hopes and dreams

Time permits a young mind

To explore the infinite

Before realizing he does not have the infinite

Time displays a myriad of choices

Then slowly closes each of them

Before we know they were even possible

Time is the giver of what we do not take

Time is the choice we do not choose

Time is the laughter we hear when we fail

So we hope to warn others

About what Time did to us

But they fail to listen as we failed to listen

Time then gives up on us

As we gave up on it

Once becomes once more

Not with the old man

But with his grandson

All we can do is watch the inevitable

Since Time cannot fail

That is its sole weakness

Time can never evolve

Ironically captured in its own loop

Time repeats ad infinitum

Garnering no accolades in the process

We, on the other hand

Achieve and fail

remembering both

Time presents as an ally

Pitied by the wiser mind

Feared by the man on the cusp of life

We can beat Time at its own game

Or die trying

I like my odds in this fight

It snowed that morning, laying a thick heavy blanket on the still-colorful leaves before the sun roused from its slumber. Across the street in Vicar's field, yellowed grasses and wild grains peeked their heads from the layers of flakes to glance at the whitened world around them. The streets were devoid of blemishes, marked only by their outline of sturdy mailboxes and the shiny red flags.

The brush dipped deep in white and smeared across the autumn day, erasing the trees, the leaves, the houses, the fields, and the round face of a little boy pressed against the wide front window. Once again, the canvas was blank. The artist dipped his brush in green.

He is the master of the world confined to the fifteen square foot blank space before him, but even he cannot deny that Spring is coming.

I glance at my reflection,

its cracks spreading like roots in the ground.

Each line tells a story,

some I wish I’d never found.

I am whole but not unbroken,

a mosaic of joy and despair.

Yet even in the shattered pieces,

a fragile beauty lingers there.

I’ll hold the fragments closer,

learn to love their jagged form.

For even in imperfection,

there’s a calm within the storm.

The sand feels different today. I run it through my fingers, counting each grain as it falls, though I know that's impossible. One, two, three—the rest blur together like static. The morning fog hasn't burned off yet, and the pier stretches into nothing, its endpoint lost in gray.

I've been here six hours. Or maybe twenty minutes. Time moves differently when you're counting sand.

"Ma'am?" A voice breaks through. Police, probably. They always come eventually. "Are you alright?"

I don't look up. Can't look up. There's work to be done. "I'm organizing," I tell him, my voice raw from the salt air. "Each pile needs exactly one thousand grains. It's important to be precise."

His shadow falls across my workspace, disrupting the careful patterns I've drawn in the sand. Concentric circles, each smaller than the last, spiraling inward toward some truth I can't quite grasp. Yesterday there were seventeen circles. Today I count twenty-three. Tomorrow there might be none.

"Dr. Garcia called us," he says gently. "She's worried about you. You missed your last three appointments."

A laugh bubbles up, salty-bitter as seaweed. "Dr. Garcia doesn't understand. I'm conducting an experiment." My fingers tremble as I separate another small pile. "If you remove one memory at a time, at what point do you stop being yourself?"

The tide is coming in. I feel it in my bones, that slow creep of water. Soon it will wash away my work, like it does every day. Like it has every day since Mason—

No. Don't think about Mason. Don't think about the pier, or the fog, or why you know exactly how long it takes a body to—

"Five hundred ninety-eight, five hundred ninety-nine..." My voice cracks. "I lost count. I have to start over."

The officer crouches beside me. Through my peripheral vision, I catch a glimpse of his nameplate: Officer Collins. He was here yesterday too, though he's pretending this is our first meeting. They all pretend.

"How about we get you somewhere warm?" he suggests. "The fog's getting thicker."

"You don't understand," I whisper, my fingers cramping as I scrape together another pile. "If I can just figure out the exact number—if I can find the precise point where a heap becomes not a heap, where a person becomes not a person—then maybe I can work backwards. Maybe I can find the grain of sand that changed everything. The moment before it all went wrong."

A wave crashes closer, sending spray across my carefully ordered piles. The salt mingles with something warm on my cheeks. When did I start crying?

"One grain at a time," I murmur, more to myself than Officer Collins. "That's all it takes. One grain, and then another, and another, until suddenly your heap is gone. Until suddenly you're gone. But if you can count them—if you can keep track—maybe you can put them back in the right order. Maybe you can rebuild..."

The fog swallows the rest of my words. In the distance, a siren wails, or maybe it's just the foghorn. These days, I can't always tell the difference between warning sounds.

-----

Dr. Garcia's office smells like lavender and lies. She thinks she's clever, using aromatherapy to mark the passage of time—lavender on Mondays, sage on Wednesdays, eucalyptus on Fridays. As if temporal anchors could stop the slipping.

"You're agitated today," she observes, pen hovering above her notepad. Three months ago, she used blue ink. Two months ago, black. Today it's red, like warning signs, like blood in water.

"I made progress," I tell her, watching dust motes drift in the afternoon light. Each speck a tiny universe, falling. "I reached six hundred grains yesterday before Officer Collins interrupted. That's eighteen more than my previous record."

She doesn't look up from her notepad. "And how many times have you met Officer Collins?"

"Once," I say automatically. Then: "No, three times. Or—" The certainty crumbles like wet sand between my fingers. "He pretends it's always the first time. They all pretend."

"Who pretends?"

"Everyone. The officers. The lifeguards. The man who sells ice cream by the pier." My hands twist in my lap. "Even Mason pretends, when I see him in the fog."

The scratching of her pen stops. In the silence, I hear the clock on her wall ticking. One second, two seconds, three—how many seconds before a lifetime becomes a life sentence?

"We've talked about Mason," she says carefully, each word measured, weighed, precise. "About what happened on the pier."

"Nothing happened on the pier." The words taste like salt. "Nothing happens. Nothing is happening. Nothing will happen. Time is just grammar."

She sets down her pen. Red ink bleeds into white paper. "You were there when they found him."

"I found a shell that morning," I say, the memory suddenly sharp as broken glass. "Perfect spiral. Mathematical precision. The Fibonacci sequence made manifest in calcium carbonate. I was going to show him, explain how nature builds itself in predictable patterns, how even chaos has underlying order, but—"

My fingers trace spirals on the arm of the chair. One rotation, two, three...

"But?"

"The shell disappeared. Like the sand castles. Like Mason. Like everything, eventually. Entropy in action." I look up at her window, where fog is creeping in despite the afternoon sun. "Did you know that beach sand moves? Littoral drift. Constant motion. What you touch in one moment is gone the next. The beach you stand on today isn't the same beach as yesterday."

"Is that why you count the grains? To hold onto something constant?"

A laugh escapes, hollow as a seashell. "I count to find the edge. The boundary. If you remove one grain of sanity, are you still sane? Two grains? Three? Where's the line, Doctor? When does a person become a patient? A mother become a mourner? A witness become a—"

I stop. The fog is pressing against the windows now, impossible for this time of day, this time of year. Through its gray veil, I see a familiar silhouette on the pier.

"He's out there," I whisper, reaching toward the window, fingers grabbing empty air. "On the pier right now. All I have to do is count backwards, find the right number, the exact moment—"

"There is no pier outside my window," Dr. Garcia says softly. "We're three miles inland."

I blink. She's right. The window shows only a parking lot, sun-baked and solid. No fog. No pier. No Mason.

"I need to go," I say, standing. My legs shake like sand castles in rising tide. "The beach changes with every wave. If I don't get back soon, I'll lose count. Have to start over. Have to—"

"Please sit." Her voice has an edge now, sharp as shells, as broken promises. "We're not done."

But I'm already at the door, fingers reaching for the handle. I step into the hallway. The cold lights flicker—one, two, three…

-----

The sun is setting now, or rising. The fog makes it hard to tell, turning everything the color of old memories. I've arranged three hundred and forty-seven piles of sand, each containing exactly one thousand grains. Or maybe it's seven hundred and twelve piles of three hundred and forty-seven grains. The numbers swim like fish beneath the surface.

Officer Collins sits beside me now, no longer pretending this is our first meeting. His radio crackles with static that sounds like waves breaking.

"Tell me about the shell," he says.

My hands keep moving, sorting, counting. "Fibonacci. Perfect spiral. Mathematical certainty in an uncertain universe." A grain slips through my fingers. "Mason would have understood. He was brilliant at math, did I tell you? Sixth grade, but already taking pre-algebra. He could see patterns everywhere. Even in chaos. Especially in chaos."

"Wiser than his years." His voice is gentle. Like the fog. Like Mason's was, before. "What happened after you found it?"

"He was angry about the phone." The words come easier now, worn smooth like sea glass. "Such a small thing. A stupid thing. One week without it, that's all. His grades were slipping. He needed to focus. I thought the beach would help him find his peace, like it always had before. If I had just... if I had waited one more day, let him keep it one more day..."

My fingers stop moving. A thousand grains of sand cascade into nothing.

"You couldn't have known," Officer Collins says.

"There was a pattern," I insist. "In his behavior. In his moods. In the way he stormed out, slammed the door. The way he ran—" My voice cracks like a shell under pressure. "I counted the seconds before I followed. One, two, three... sixty-seven. Sixty-seven seconds between his door and mine. Between his footsteps and mine. Between mother and—"

"That wasn't your fault."

"But where's the line?" The words tumble out like tide rushing in. "How many seconds of anger before discipline becomes cruelty? How many moments of rebellion before attention-seeking becomes... If you remove one word of the argument, then another, then another, at what point does a mother's caution become a child's last—"

"Stop." His hand hovers near my shoulder but doesn't touch. "The investigators were clear. The railing was wet from the fog. When he turned around to come back—"

"No." I pull away, start a new pile. "That's not—I need to count. Need to find the right number. If I can just figure out how many grains make a heap, how many moments make a childhood, how many breaths between defiance and regret, between standing and falling, between his laugh and his—"

The fog shifts, and suddenly Mason is there, at the end of the pier. Twelve years old forever, balancing on the upper rail, turning back with that look—half-anger, half-fear, whole child. "Mom," he says, or maybe it's just the wind. "Mom, I didn't mean—"

"Do you see him?" I whisper.

Officer Collins follows my gaze. "I see fog," he says softly.

"He's trying to tell me something. He's always trying to tell me something." My voice sounds far away, like shouting underwater. "But I can't... the numbers keep changing. The grains keep shifting. Yesterday I was sure it was one thousand grains. Today it might be three. Tomorrow..."

A wave crashes against the pier's pylons. When the spray clears, Mason is gone. Like always. Like everything.

"Come on," Officer Collins says, standing. He offers his hand. "The tide's coming in."

I look down at my piles. The neat circles I've spent hours creating are already disappearing, erased by wind and water. Tomorrow I'll make new ones. Tomorrow I'll count again. Tomorrow I'll find the right number, the perfect equation, the exact point where everything changed. Where a mother's discipline became a child's rebellion became an empty bedroom with a phone still charging on the nightstand.

Or maybe I won't. Maybe that's the real paradox—not how many grains make a heap, but how many times you can watch it disappear before you accept that some questions don't have answers. Some patterns exist only in the spaces between "I love you" and "I'm sorry."

I take his hand. Let him pull me up. My feet leave perfect prints in the wet sand as we walk away from the pier.

Behind us, the fog swallows everything—the piles, the patterns, the possibilities. One grain at a time, until nothing remains but the sound of waves counting seconds into infinity, each one the exact length of a child's last breath.

Four times, four times I nearly died. Once I think I did, watching myself from a distance, but came back.

Cars, violence, birth...the question is why?

Why am I here?Why is anyone here?Why?

Every soul has a choice, good or evil I believe, and I chose good, light, but I could have gone the other way.

Remember this..choose.

Lava

Chair

Snow

Blue

Carpet

Paint

Jog

Tired

Where I Live

November 28, 2024

Where I live

Bikini season just ended

It will begin anew

On Monday

We have 28 words

For Sunny

We have no words

For Cold

Sea Turtles

Crossing the beaches

Is the largest

Spectator sport

Breakfast consists

Of crabs

And conch

With an OJ chaser

Unfortunately,

Amazon shipping rates

Are astronomical

But worth it

I see constellations

Few,

where I grew up,

Have ever witnessed

I feel breezes

Carrying songs of

Love and more love

Never once a piercing siren

I know my neighbors

They know me

We rely on each other

When adversity strikes

Each day is measured

By the quality of opportunity

Not the quantity presented

Or the quantity taken

I live on island time

Even though

I don’t live

On an island

I learned snorkeling

By trading away

Rush hour

And income tax season

Where I live

Is where you should live

I await your arrival

I’ll make it worth your while

Standing in the rain

Drizzle to deluge

Panhandling

To deep sea fishing

For souls

Harvesting soggy morsels

Of philosophical discourse

Colored with

Blue light specials

Worn by beings

Dancing on the far shore

Soaked with angst

In the watery garden

Absurdly harvesting outcomes

In this existential café

The Agony of Defeat

November 26, 2024

Which would you rather have?

The knowledge that these feet (I could not fit both feet in the space provided) were earned through continuous labor for decades.

Or?

The knowledge that the grandiose story you told of how these feet appeared is not true.

Truth has both a purpose and a result. Eventually, someone will discover the truth.

Let them verify the veracity of your claim.

Or,

Let them validate the charges against your character.

The choice is yours.

Choose wisely.

You truly never know how sick you've become until you've been cured. The complications behind the interludes and brumes of introspection beseech order, entwined in a sense of desire and purpose. If you can find that within yourself - great. Not many do. But when you can find that bliss and structure within another, it sets an alchemical reaction for both of you to reach for the stars, to catch each other when the other floats in the nebula of their uncertainty. You make it certain in their head that everything will be alright, and that all it takes is one step forward to be greater than the you that took the last.