2019 is dead and buried, and has been supplanted by 2020 as the “present year”; time spills forward like a great river, eventually drowning us all, and carrying our waterlogged corpses toward unseen future shores. When and where our journey ends is unknown until we arrive and there is fuck-all that can be done about it. But this year’s passing is different. I did not wish for 2019 to end, nor was I so transfixed by its events that I wished it to remain longer; it just feels different. My life is becoming more illusory, more ephemeral with each passing day.
There is a haze that follows me, quietly looming about my person like a benign ghost in gray silence, but the further I progress in my life, the deeper and thicker the haze becomes as it swirls about me and suffuses my reality. Things just sort of stop mattering. They become blurry and obfuscated until they eventually just disappear, and I often find myself wondering if this isn’t indicative of something important, ominous, but I’m not sure what. Is it my death drawing nearer? Is it my memories blurring together as more of the already scarce space in my brain is occupied? Or is it simply that fragments of other possible realities -those of the variety which were only narrowly avoided and at great cost- are bleeding into this one and confusing my perception of what is and isn’t real?
Who can say what the future holds? I just float down the tributaries and backwaters of time and hope my good fortune holds out.
Towers of Rust 