I had today off anyway, but we're being hammered by a major winter storm, ice and snow everywhere, so I'm stuck at home. And unstuck in time.
For nine years, I worked for a company providing services for the elderly and infirm. Mostly, I drove a bus and made various deliveries. The pay wasn't great, but I could afford decent insurance and a two-week vacation every year. I lacked for nothing in those days, had money for travel and fine food while still keeping up my increasingly costly record collecting and video habits.
Not much actually happened in all those years, but it felt as though it would, I was perpetually on the verge of doing...something. Nothing was clear, but better days awaited me.
Those nine years ended almost eleven years ago, when I met Sue Ellen. We lived together, got married. Our time together totaled five years. One life ended, another began, then that one ended. Nearly six years ago.
More time, more numbers:
One year spent living with various family members, as my bank account recovered from the split with my wife and my body recovered from a suicide attempt.
Various dead-end assignations with assorted women, measured in months or weeks or days.
Two years since Mom died, which finally and definitively ended any connection to the life I'd always known.
Nearly a year and a half since I met Tabbatha, with whom the promise of another, radically different life appeared, a life based around family and children, a life I'd never known I wanted. I loved her, and her son, and was surprised and overjoyed by the depth of my feelings. But it wasn't meant to be--we split up, mere months ago.
Years and months, days and weeks, all still immediate, all fading into the past.
I recall a day like this from eleven years ago, a snow day spent languishing in front of the TV, gorging on chocolate chip cookies and reruns of TJ Hooker, Monika curled up and purring on my lap. Monika, the beloved cat I abandoned to Mom when I got married, Monika now returned to me as Mom's final gift. She looks the same, acts the same, is the same, though she's nearly fourteen.
If she's fourteen, then I'm...much older, with extra pounds, an ache in my knees and a metallic heel. But do I feel any different? Am I like Monika, so content in her little space, untouched and untroubled by the larger world? Has everything that has happened to me had any meaning? Did I miss my best days, or are they still to come? Does the past repeat, or stay behind? Why does today feel like 1996? What triggers these thoughts, these feelings?
Time is a ghost accompanying me, haunting and taunting, and in the past I've listened to its whispered warnings. But no more. Life's too short to let this ghost determine every step.
