Dear Time,
In younger years, I would have written this letter to you with romance. It would have teemed with hope and optimism and blossoming expectation. You have this way, do you not, of carrying in you all that a life could be - regardless of what it is at any moment. And I would have, like so many (is it every one of us?), set out to woo you into validating the life I aimed at.
Do you get those kinds of letters often, Time? It would not be surprising to hear that your mailbox is full of the unwrinkled songs of fresh love and clear direction.
But this is not that note. You have shown your true faces to me, and so it seems only fair to speak as directly as one can. “Faces” is no mistake; of all the ghosts that haunt, you are one of the most erratic. You have filled the wells, and you have drained those same wells to dust - was it in the same breath that you did both? You have stacked up the beautiful things, and then thrown them into the fire one by one; staring at me with your cold, moon-colored eyes at every flurry of sparks.
Perhaps this is all poetic and dramatic, but that is because you yourself are these things. Have I not seen how much you love the irony of things - the doubling back to the same parts of life, only for those parts to be redefined in ways unwanted? With enough of your handiwork, the most beautiful of places and people and memories become the very substance of heartbreak. Places of birth become places of death. Homes that were loud turned into houses too clean and too still. People that laughed freely made into weathered, weary versions of themselves.
You are confusing, if I am to be blunt (and perhaps this is a compliment in your mind, as much as it stings to compliment you). There is a blunt trauma about you, like some kind of silent hammer. You leave a person in pieces - parts of them here; tatters over there. And what is left but something like schizophrenia: the ripping of a person across places and years. The memories and parts of a person are scattered and discarded or clung to, and they are left a dismantled version of what they were. They have loved and lost and found and lost again. Indeed it sounds beautiful; but now where they look to stand in one place, they actually inhabit a hundred. You have seen to it that their whole self has been shattered into fragments and sown out like seed among the winds of all the sunrises of their life.
How is a person to speak with you then? You are impact and force. You are the crushing gusts of storm wind. You are the sound of the tool swung through the air - the hollowed out silence of what has come and gone, and will never be again.
It would be easy to leave you at this, Time. You have not been kind to many, and those many would damn you even as they cannot avoid you. Perhaps that is why they are prone to damn you, the shadow that will not disappear, even in the noon sun of living.
I will not pretend that you are some kind of misunderstood blessing; as if it takes only the proper lenses to see you as bright and beautiful. Would you not know how cheap that kind of consolation is? It does not hold up against the confusion you bring. There is truly no understanding you or your patterns. There is no way for a person to wrap their hands around what you are to bring things to a tame spot. But it is clear that such a thing has never been the proper way of understanding you. There is nothing about you that is comprehensible - not even the ability to categorize you in the hopes of comprehending you. How can one understand the wind that peels things apart?
It is your incomprehensibility that seems to be something of your very purpose. You cannot be tamed by a man, and so a man ought not attempt such foolishness. But you are also force, and that means that you are indeed wielded. I know your games, Time. You cannot act without an actor. You cannot connect the points of my history - the love to the pain, and the heartbreak back to the holy - unless there is someone plotting you on the map. The only other option is that you are nothing but random chance, and that is so clearly not the case. It cannot be.
But perhaps this is what I have misunderstood for so long: you, Time, are not the agent I have assumed you to be, because you are not, in fact, an agent. You are what is caused, not the cause. It is not that I have missed what you do, but I have missed that you are not alone - not some rogue agent of chaos in my life.
In fact, maybe I have given you too much credit in all of this. You are not some criminal come to spoil the painting of my life. You are the paint itself. And the meaning of each color has indeed been reordered and reworked more than once, but there again it was not you that did it. Quite to the contrary, you have been nothing but the slow - often infuriatingly slow - build of the piece. The colors have clashed, have been smeared and blended a hundred different times in ways that make no sense, but is that not how all paintings are made? How could one be righteously furious with the shades of their life? How could I be hateful when I have not seen the hues brought together yet?
Do not take this as a reconciliation between us just yet, Time. There are still pieces of you that I will spend a lifetime haunted by. But perhaps I have missed that all this confusion - all the scattering of life from a million confrontations with you - is not some kind of mistake. You are not some kind of mistake. You are the very means by which all those pieces will come to be something. You are not the thing I must work against, but the way all the confusion will be made sense of.
It is not set at rights now, but that does not mean it never will be. I am betting on it. And that bet, ironically enough, is only seen out by way of you.
So perhaps we really must bury this hatchet. I am not at ease with you, but neither can I hate you. I have not even come to know you fully. So come closer, please. I am sure you have things to tell me; things, dare I say, to teach me. You have drawn all these lines across my life - are there not some more still to go? Is the sketch not still going on?
If nothing else, I can see now that how all of it looks - every tiny dot of living - is no testament to where it is going. The most beautiful things really do come from some of the meanest places.
What kind of roads will you carve in this deforesting, Time? What kind of harbors found by the howls of this storm?
Though the fig tree may not blossom,
Nor fruit be on the vines;
Though the labor of the olive may fail,
And the fields yield no food;
Though the flock may be cut off from the fold,
And there be no herd in the stalls—
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
The Lord God is my strength;
He will make my feet like deer’s feet,
And He will make me walk on my high hills. -Hab 3:17-19
“You are not some criminal come to spoil the painting of my life. You are the paint itself.” A difficult one to accept but truer than ever. Needed this today.