In the beginning was the end. I found myself driving six hundred kilometres for a funeral for someone who shouldn’t be dead. They were too near the start to have reached the finish. Me? I’m sitting in the room of a fifty dollar motel. I never would have picked the attached Chinese restaurant as a great laksa joint, but they defied the odds. I found myself proffering relationship advice to the maitre d’. I didn’t charge. It may not have been any good.

The conversation had come around to me in the end. Where was I going? A question was posed in my mind. What would you do if you knew you had only two years left to live? A theory was proposed in response. Sometimes there is no later, and there is such a thing as too late. A reality was exposed. The tendency to tie ourselves up like martyrs nailed to the cross of our imagination is too great. I’m too busy. Too busy to go out. Too busy for holidays. Too busy for life. Then bam. Game over. It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming, one day. It turns out that there isn’t all the time in the world; just whatever time our cellular clocks are programmed to tick to. They do stop. There is no repair shop. Then what? I thought of past moments that might cling to my conscience or my curiosity. What were my big regrets? I don’t know that they even seem real now. After all they were gone. If you don’t take the chance you lose anyway right? I doubt in twenty years I’ll be thinking ‘Jeez, I’m glad I stayed in the office that extra couple of hours to really nail that report.’

Before it happened I didn’t think this way. I looked into the mirror and infinity stared back. Eternity was my lapdog. I lived each day like life was static and the future, where everything happened, was always tomorrow.

Tomorrow. It had arrived. Time to finish my journey. I woke up to pouring rain. Sometime during my unceremonious breakfast, scrambled together from the meagre contents of the esky, it cleared up. The world seemed determined to raise some cheer in me. I pulled into a petrol station for a half tank refill. The pump had an unlikely backdrop of a great body of water and a beach which was spilled across the front of the town. I considered the absent air hose for a moment as the sign seemed lonely without its natural companion the hose itself. A good bounce in my tyres would no doubt aid my journey and fit the imposed mood of the day too. While I was paying it seemed worth asking if the hose had moved location divorcing its comrade the sign. The attendant gave me what seemed like a dubious look over the top of his wire frame spectacles.

‘Do you need to pump one up, or just check them?’

I admitted it was only really a check, so he offered to help me on account of the gauge not being too reliable. I guess unreliable was indeed its nature as it must have run off in the night. I never saw it. He came out, took a good look at all my wheels and pronounced them fine. I swept the sweat from my worried brow and left with a glow of safety and assuredness. The smile stayed on my face for some three hundred kilometres. Funny how a few words and actions can stay with you.

It was the words that changed everything when it happened. Like cold steel blades through the fabric that shielded me from raw time. I heard those words. The quiet word ‘prognosis’ came first. I’m not sure who said it. Was it in a statement, or in a question? I don’t recall. Perhaps it was the news bringer who used it first. It might have been the future bereaved who dared ask, while hope quietly whispered ‘It might be ok’. Whoever said it, it wasn’t said loudly. I remember that. It was hushed. They pushed it out slowly from their mouth as if from behind velvet curtains. Barely perceptible but still stark like the cold morning glare. The softness does nothing to ease the pain. The reply? Does it matter? Six months. Twelve months. Ten years. Time becomes finite. Suddenly it is measurable in blocks whose size depends upon the length of the period in question. Days. Months. Years. It is only the number of blocks you find that matters, not their length. There are no absolutes any more.

I was lucky. The words were not aimed at me, but at my friend. I had dodged the bullet shot by Chance, for now at least. Still to see how the dice could fall for someone as young as twenty-nine sent out shockwaves that liquefied the walls of my infinite universe. Poor Eternity was buried, suffocating in the rubble. Lapdogs are not hardy breeds.

Innocence is lost when time shortens its boundaries around life. It is like watching a tendon being cut and pulling back on itself. The world was spinning too fast at first and my senses could not keep up. Insensibility gave way to a mighty roar of anger. Thoughts of injustice and unnecessary pain clouded my vision. The trees had no right to continue being green, and the river had no right to continue to flow. Did they not know, or not understand, that time had stopped? Then my senses began to adapt to the new, so much more finite, universe. The penny dropped. So loud that my heart skipped a beat. The clock had not stopped for my friend nor for me, but we no longer had the same sense of time. We counted in blocks of different sizes, and with a different sense of value. Some other mysterious trait separated the time-space we each occupied, but I was not privy to its nature.

One voice in the room said ‘She is on borrowed time.’

‘Time is always borrowed’ came my silent reply to the face I cannot picture now. We are borrowed from this earth and we must give back what is not ours to keep. I just wish that it was gentler in the taking.

We left the hospital. Space was now for loved ones. The time boundaries squeezed around, and fitted only the closest of bonds. Only the grief that was keenest felt could enter the time universe of those knocked down by the velvet boxing glove of prognosis.

This was before. Time passed and I forgave the trees and the river. I came to understand their point of view. I see the world more sharply than before when I was not conscious of my mortal connection with it. The dimensions changed though. They multiplied. I see through multiple time-lenses all at once. One tree that has lived one thousand years has time past and time future beyond the second that I stop to stare, and beyond the beginning and the end of me.

After the funeral, I pulled up at the shore. A young surfer persisted against the sea. Both had their wins. I took a walk against the sea breeze to clear my mind. As I walked back to my vehicle I found myself staring wistfully, and guiltily at the bright orange valiant parked next to her. A well made piece of ‘60s automobile magic. The owner sat casually on the bonnet watching the surfer tease the sea. We exchanged nods and mumbled greetings. He hesitantly approached and I found myself in the unlikely position of having my average ten a penny city car admired. He was thinking of a road trip and needed a suitable machine. I hope he goes. I encouraged him to the point of suspicion. We share so many connections through time that are so easily missed in the rush to get somewhere. Yet the destination is always the same for us all. I’m in no hurry to arrive. I shut my door, and followed the same road home.

At the end of my journey was a beginning. As I sit and drink my coffee I look around me. Day to day I look through the lens of infinity. Denial is a powerful force and it stops my conscious counting of the minutes falling from the clock, unrecoverable and piled on the floor. When I look through another lens, time is squeezed and finite. The picture is clear and the cycle of life is apparent in every face that passes by the café window. Each face is young and old in the same second. I see the child full of wonder and belief. I see the adult looking to a future not yet written. I see the old bent over canes recalling how things were. I see them all at once superimposed like images on a double exposed film. Birth and death are always there etched into our being. Many different faces overlap in my mind as the time-lens shifts like sitting in an optometrist’s chair. My focus is on past, present and future as one overlapping space.

The cathedral is open. I cross the road and stop at the steps. I miss the gothic, imposing, cold and dark stonework of European cathedrals. The sense of blood and toil that built them. The belief that built them. Those dark middle-ages souls full of Dante’s inferno, desperately building hoping to transfer the anguish and sin from their souls to the stones. I walk up the stairs. Inside I exchange two dollars for a candle. I am not religious. Once, in one of those vacuous dark European cathedrals, I tried to bargain with the cosmos. I exchanged the largest candle for what, I’m sure, was a small request. I wasn’t greedy. I knew the cosmos would do what it had to, but I asked it to be fair and gentle when it did. Now, in the present, I take a modest candle and pick up a taper. The wax is creamy in colour, leaning to yellow in the dim lighting, with a small erect wick extending from the conical top. I find a quiet alcove and sit my candle next to the hopes of others. I take the taper and use the flame of a neighbouring candle to light my own. My candle is younger than those around it, and by rights has longer to burn. I do not pray. I am thinking of those in the past. They are still here with me in my present. I always think of them, but usually in a hurried way. They might be a thought that flashes through my mind as I go for the bus in the morning, or turn my computer off at the end of the day. Now in front of my candle I have pure unadulterated time for being with them, and thinking of them.

Those in my past are in my future still, and in my present. They still belong. The stars in the night sky keep shining after they have ceased to burn, and the candle still flickers in the reflection in my eyes.

Copyright © Louise Osborne 2016 All Rights Reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced without written consent from the author.