Loss of Time

We think we are shielded from the ceaseless cosmic flickers, breathing within trenches in time. We discard the responsibility of creating them. Culprits, parts of a total coward inclined to vote for avoiding moments, and therein lies the issue. Those unmoments. They plague the mind, contrary to their purpose to soothe it and renew the reluctance to accept the next second. And the next.

The heart and its drumming tantrum daze the leaps of reality they intend to nullify for even an instant, regardless of their character. They do not discriminate between stumbling words of rehearsed speeches in front of audiences of hundreds or the latent puncture of a forbidden syringe behind mother's back. They pay little attention to the brain's cries. Without coordination, one's tendency to listen to its resilient pumping does little to help the one organ desperate to die.

The real challenge is to admit in body, one that denies inconvenient logic, that the wisdom of eternal biology does not apply considerations in the face of chronic and invisible agony. There are evils such as one's own, but it is involuntary and born of destiny, not chosen and not elector. There are evils without author, beyond this very one who writes today. There are evils and they are colossal in comparison to the good memory of the day before yesterday.

This cosmic flicker is nemesis, antithesis, antagonist, and so many other atrocities in the face of those yearning for non-existence. It refuses to consider the validity of any reason, present in the stories of so many, to fall in love with oblivion. There must be a flaw in nature's most advanced calculations to allow such an error. I must know who to blame for the lack of an addressee to whom I should direct my demands. I need to know yesterday the diagnosis of a heart that is not lacking in tantrums but has died unaware. Of that I am certain. I can no longer find angles, hidden spots on its surface to uncover any physical symptom and it does not require a doctorate to infer such obviousness. I know of the bruises, scratches, and every irregularity on its outer tissue and they have nothing to do with sudden death. There is a record of antecedents, and they all have to do with the flicker.

If one were to open a museum for the stack of recorded evidence, each moment would represent an empty glass case. Within lies a clear, distinguishable particularity of which to dissect in the most pedantic of analyses. It is not a metaphorical representation of an artist's need for the unknowable, nor is it the sorrow caused upon the sight of a see-through void. Nothingness itself would be an answer no short of ignorant. You would think, and foolishly so—enough for the very purpose of explaining the point of it in detail to dissolve into writhing groans of the maker themselves, with their eyes reddened by presumptuous hopes that the not-so-clear, not-at-all-distinguishable particularity of the not-thingness would magically manifest as your first guess—, that there was no point in that, no matter how complex its presentation. The answer, however, is simply the enclosure of the cosmic flicker.

It wanes and it grows. It is, it has been, and always will be. This flicker is merely a conflation of everything contained in the in-betweens of transient presence, the crux of reality itself, but it could not be more complicated to extrapolate its branching chaos. A singularity of misfortunes, if you will. We are all bearers of it. Creators, even, if one subscribes to the concept of free will. Otherwise, it is only calamity brought upon oneself, ignorant of consent.

Reading its most abstract definition will cause one to question how reliable its study in the realm of academics, even to the point of suggesting—or rather dismissing it as gibberish. Such deflections are expected of subjects prone to denying its weight. It is felt moment to moment. And it has many words and concepts, each so differently defined, that its core is left to the philosophers to describe in painstaking understanding. Thought, memory, daydream, nightmare. They are derived words masking the un-ness of the flicker. Every single synonym an attention to details found only by the troubled mind, carefully packaged in the comforting yet fictitious duality of good and evil. We avoid it so earnestly we get lost in its very purpose, yet we tune out the flicker, the drumming tantrums of the heart, and the mindless inhaling of air—all at the same time. We propose a quantum overlap accessible solely to the practitioners of a faith shared in harmonious agreement by timeless aristocrats and peasants alike, because they live and die in and by words of innocuous observations they presume unique to their riches or their penury. We feel the flicker and ache in the knowledge of not knowing how to make the other ache in the same way. We sink in spirals to depths of trenches believing we rise to the up-above. We believe ourselves shielded from the cosmic flicker, the intimate void, the untranslatable ache, yet we dedicate plentiful poetries to its name.