I feel like I have thirty minutes to sum up everything I know. It’s not that the plane is going to crash or the world will meet its end, or even that everything or anything at all will change. It won’t. Things will go on just as they always do, this deadline is arbitrary and frustrating, because it’s self-created and imposed. It’s me trying to make up for lost time, which as we know, is a commodity which only goes one way. You cannot have extra of it. You can only not have enough.

I do not recount these lost times as a failure, but I worry that I must document them, write them in a ledger to show how far into the red I am. What has come out of this narrow, driving line. I could start with all the way at the beginning of the year, but with all the empty minutes and hours in the way, I doubt I can remember that far. I shall start wherever I find closest and journey onward.
The first product of my empty hours was a letter.
I could have written and delivered it, wishing a happy holiday (whichever one was nearest at the time) or scrounging up aspects of my life to dress up, emblazon and be proud of, but the curtain of fallen seconds prevented me from seeing those noteworthy accomplishments and I swore only to write when I had something worth saying. The letter was never written, and the recipient is now too late to receive it. That time is gone.

I could also note the times lost to ennui and drink, for they were many and stretched on, creating only double their length with how little I enjoyed them. Misery passes slowly, as does the time when you have an itch that begs to be nursed, the agony of every moment until satisfaction. THe itch went away without being scratched, my malaise faded without being cured, the spirits evaporated from my pores without my respite. As is the way, the itch returns.

Financing was always a bother, but never so much as current when accounts were overdrawn or underpaid, and I’d no recollection of it. THe sheer day escaped me, and the debts knocked down my (often uninhabited) hall, but it was forgetfulness that caused the pain so. I could often find the funds, but my distraction was what forced the collectors’ ire. I was irreliable. It has become my foremost trait.

In a final thought, I dare the second most tempestuous in its loss was when I failed to smile. Long we held eyes, on an unseasonably beautiful afternoon when I was unseasonably present outdoors. I had grown apprehensive of my grim pallor, it belied a truth I was not yet to face, that I was wasting away. My shoulders shook with a cloak of ghosted seconds and my ankles dragged, shackled by the weight of dead days. Still I looked up, through the paths of beetles and bees in a garden so sweet that the air could become nectar, and there I saw you.
If I looked poorly, you looked conversely wonderful. My paleness was that of cobwebs and bleached shadow, yours was the fullness of milk. There was such life in you, and still is I have little doubt.
Perhaps you saw the gravestones in my lashes, the wind-whipped tremor in my voice. You stared on, as did I, as did we, locked in our few paltry instants together.
And I did not smile.

It is merely the end of a year, another time to raise a glass to all that is gone and shall come anew, but I raise a pen in my ledger of failures that nothing will change, no stroke of midnight can twist my direction, no spirit may veer my soul. I am shouldering vast forces and lost smiles. THe new day ahead is built on the ruined structures of those from before.
And I stumble with them.