Is there such a thing as love for oneself only, beautiful as one might be?” she would condescendingly think. Could a person love only oneself and none other? Is there such thing as love only for oneself? Can there be love when one is alone as Adam was before Eve? Or even as Adam and Eve were, alone, just the two of them? Or perhaps the three of them? For they say there was a second Eve for the three of them to share each other’s blessings. Could there have been true love with all the sensual pleasures that must be part of love if there were only one, or just two of them? The sweetness of love is surely more tempting, more exciting, more burning, in the presence of more than two lovers, it was a seductive thought. For love is a holy gift to be shared in community with others, as the Lord Jesus had meant it. Doesn’t love involve sharing one’s world with another or better yet with many others?
The thought was persuasive; truly that must be what Heaven is like, she concluded.
Such pleasures standing naked before her full length mirror conversing with her galloping mind in search away from decadent self-pity. At times she chanted her inquiries with angels and saints oblivious to the inanities aborting in a mind not firing with all neurons. Her sanity was intellectually masked with fierce questions as to who she might be with no easy answers forthcoming. There was the reality of the fabulous body struggling to morally reconcile her conscious to the desperate tendencies of an unstable personality. As Jesus would have wanted her, she indulged in consuming spiritual reflections: too many spiritual and base images confusing her mind, the mess at times suggesting divine gluttony. Pissed at her pious hypocrisy, she was grateful at times that there was never enough time to fully settle such ambiguous deliberations like love hiding somewhere in her mind. There would be time enough for all these thoughts and she didn’t want to give time the day to weasel not so subtly into her mind and corrupt her beauty. Too much thinking produced wrinkles in the brain. It was a waste of time, for who really knows what love is. Sadly, after all the years that were her life, Sharon could not say who she was, or that she had any inkling of what love was. Her one worldly stable element in her life, she was thrilled, was the love of her friends. And every so often, without surprise, the ghostly apparition of her dreams, would appear before her cabernet cloudy eyes, and slash his sword through her air, as a reminder.
*
When at times in the depths of gloom, she wished she could run away from time which was fast leaving her behind. During those moments of unhappiness she could feel time crumbling everything around her. Time was making her old faster than she could measure. It was fast killing her and she had no time to figure out how it was that the ticking of the clocks was racing her breathless to depression. Deep in her heart she knew it was time, of which she felt she had very little left, that was exhausting her, making her miserable and confused as it whirled inside her head like other short term thoughts that faded as quickly as they arrived, leaving her in consternation. Carelessly she would dress and undress, try on different colors depending on the time of day, and drink lots of white and red wines in the privacy of her bedroom to keep away the thought that maybe she should join some miserable nunnery, like Phil and his monastery, and have the time to devoutly think of the meaning of time in her present haphazard life of untested friendships, and an empty husband. Time was sweeping away all the fast food plentiful riches and the uneasy serenity of the many splendored pills and tonics, all of which now seemed to her the equivalent of accumulating blank days in an empty mental archive never again to be visited. Ingeniously she gathered her days into clever miracles of timeless observations that only she could detect.
Is time the same as conscience, she heard herself say.
She wasn’t sure, because in time there seemed to be conscience.
A spark from some undefined sphere within her soul had delivered the unsuspecting message that life is temporary even for the Lord’s most beautiful creations, such as she was. Though she would tease herself, touch and feel good about what she was seeing and feeling, she was tortured by the fear that even she, more beautiful than anything else currently on this earth, was nothing more than temporary. Everything is temporary, and temporary is a tiny slice of time which is eternal, she thought.
Alone, she cried perfectly clear globules of uncontrollable tears to no effect.
Everything was temporary. Between the beginning and the end, everything was full of madness; thank God all things are temporary. Even marriage, contrary to the impossible commitment, till death do us part, was too silly not to be temporary. They had ninety-three wonderful years together, before she passed away, Sharon coldly summed to herself, thinking of the billions of ghosts now floating alone in the vastness of time immemorial. Everything, regardless of the duration, was temporary. Damn unrelenting time! It respects nothing. Why did God have to make time? What a horrible reminder and cruel tormentor of all living things, but especially of youth and beauty, is time.
She looked in the expensive Florentine mirror and sashayed across her bedroom in full naked length noting her lilywhite buttocks, so familiar to her.
Above all, she thought, time is the enemy of all things beautiful, like her alabaster buttocks. Ugly, hateful, pent up time, unmercifully released by the gatekeeper sun to insult youth, her face flushed in anger at the damn light.
Anyway, there was tremendous comfort in the thought that there is no time in Heaven; no clocks, no time; that’s what makes Heaven so beautiful. It couldn’t be otherwise: for Heaven is eternal, and it makes no sense to keep track of eternity.
She put on a yellow Polo knit, soft perfect over her firm outstanding breasts. She would never wear a bourgeois Polo in public but it felt pleasingly soft in her bedroom and she indulged in its comfort, in her bedroom. A little polo pony above the tip of her tit.
“I love you, I love you, and I’m slowly melting away, and I don’t know what to do,” she said to her body. “I love you and I just want to die as I am this moment.”
Her preoccupation with time was somewhat new to her. Not completely new because everybody keeps track of time, and all her life she had a watch, and she was aware of the cliché to be on time. But her recent out of nowhere anxieties about time were strangely curious and not like other times. They surfaced during the weirdest moments, intense and atonal in their determination to disturb at times when her mind was already uneasy. She had no idea wherefrom the timely thoughts invaded her mind, but she didn’t mind, and initially she found strange excitement in her obsession with time. At first she was a bit reluctant to acknowledge the truth, that the reality of her married life came shrouded in time, as did all other weird thoughts that out of nowhere rode on time to irritate her mind, but she eventually accepted the repetitive beat of time as unavoidable. In the beginning, time had been a neutral subject before it slowly became the dominant challenge in her life.
But then, it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do.
The problem was that in time, reality and time began to clash. It had become a mystery to Sharon how something innocuous like time could occupy so much of her time. Finally, she concluded that the meaning of time was an explanation of life, an important revelation transmitted into her brain for a reason, by higher sources than she, and were meant to be uttered as a prophet might reveal and preach his holy visions. She began to like the forcefulness of these bewildering apocalypses, because they gave urgency to her life, a sense of participation that was lacking before their visits. At the very least, they made her feel smarter, charged with inspirational mysteries impassioned with poetic promises of wonderful future events, undoubtedly more interesting than those of the unhappy past or the regretful now.
She looked at her digital clock, set it to digital noon, and unplugged it. It would always be noon in her life, she mused. Noon time would never invade with dark shadows to disturb her looks and mind. Not wanting to, she couldn’t help but think that there wasn’t much after beauty, a creation of time, but may
be madness.
Time and its associates, light and madness, gravely waiting on the side line to gouge my heart out, she would think. I hate the hipster sunlight that floods my days with jealousy and envy. Daily it swiftly comes and goes and robs me of my lovely allotted time, she would sob her way to another drink.
“Light is time and time is light, and light is the beginning and end of all. This I know; time is green jealousy, full of envy, for why else would it destroy all things beautiful?”
Alone in the house of Hank, cluttered thoughts streamed across her consciousness sending her mentally back to find comfort in the loving days, when she was with her mother, and light and time did not exist. There she found pleasant thoughts. Immense happiness reappeared the deeper she ventured into her childhood with her mother, and strangely, time disappeared out of her present. Even though she thought she hated her mother, the enjoyment she found in the more and more frequent emotional visits with her had a soothing, stabilizing effect, allowing her to function in her minimum daily chores and affairs without displaying any crazy manners or changes to her personality, so that no one could have perceived any odd behavior. Nothing that she did or said could have been misconstrued as being abnormal because that’s the way Sharon had always been: simply beautiful in all her flaws.
It would be something to live in some Scandinavian country where it’s dark nine months out of the year. Surely the darkness there slows down time, she often thought. And sometimes Myrna would come to mind, and Sharon understood that probably Myrna was of Viking descent because she didn’t seem to be affected by the passing of time. And then quite often, from sunny Sicily, Claudio would pay a quick mental visit, but she didn’t know why, didn’t care, and she wasn’t going to waste her time on Claudio.
It was the Lord that made light and time, including Claudio who was a much better lover than Hank, she immediately cursed the offending thought, darker than the darkest sea. But it was all true, He had made all things, including Claudio.
What strange sensations were these thoughts? Her eyes would sparkle huge more than ever, as each profound mental revelation emerged evermore on a daily basis. She could be doing anything, anywhere, and joyously they’d pop into her brain.
She became convinced that there definitely was a purpose to these vividly illuminating visitations, whose meaning had yet to be made known to her, but it was coming. Surely there was profound intelligence behind the graceful stream of extraordinary beautiful words entering her mind and energising her.
“Without a doubt, the sun is the fast processor of this hurtful life,” she took another hit, obviously derived from ancient lineage.
She waited for the next burst.
“Death starts out yellow,” she heard herself say.
It was a marvellously succinct thought. She liked it very much.
The successive, pedigreed-inspired revelations, and they must’ve been, because they weren’t cogitated by her highly not so bright mind, must have originated from a Higher Source, which made Sharon feel special, that she was who she was, but, at the same time, somewhat confused about becoming what she was becoming. Cheerfully, that Higher Source was now always in Sharon’s mind. A few yesterdays before, she had been less confused, but felt worse at what she was, because being young and even younger, she still had no sense of what she might be becoming.
Being chosen, like others before her, was very satisfying to her soul. She could not deny that perfection lay before her mortal life, which was full of sin, and could only be cleansed with saintly devotion, as apparently demanded by the Lord. Subliminal thoughts focused her eyes on Heavenly realms where the ultimate reality transcended the base existence she was leading. Salvation lay in the Holy Spirit of the Bible. Some use incense to lull the spirit home; some use wine; and some use both incense and wine, for the shades of grey that grace the mind are very dull without the unlimited variety of saintly spirits.
When she was younger she subscribed to the importance of the body’s external looks, as youth is naturally inclined to do. But as she matured and time kicked in without respect, she wanted to believe that she was more spiritual, more intellectual. Certainly more cerebral than her husband’s laughable IQ. She wanted the world to see that she was more than just a fabulous piece of ass. If only she could match her physical beauty with the erudition that was there, inside her, to shock the world and her friends with witty comments, that showed the brilliance of her brains.
And as is the case with too much thinking, every rambling thought was chocked with the malevolent curse of time, which was making her brain smooth and her skin wrinkly. Gratefully, Sharon thanked the Lord for the expensive skin care products and multi-vitamin regimes that pitched in to help deny and keep at bay the not so subtle deathly reminders, like stupid crow’s feet.
Ah, that youth be twice, no three or four times, she thought, and old age never, and she gingerly took another sip from her bloody red savage cabernet full of the Holy Spirit. She had read that cabernet sauvignon increased longevity and it made sense to drink it.
Though her breasts and buttocks were still as firm as ever, there was no denying the evils of light; but the evils of time were even worse. Decaying time was warping all her dreams, and she spent a fortune trying to check it, day in and night out, with creams, serums, and moisturizers. But nothing could blunt the chronic emotional agony of Satan inserted light. Light was evil, and there was evil everywhere in her world. She hated light, especially the morning’s light, because it woke up time. It made her do things when she didn’t want to do anything, like get out of bed just because it was light. Without light the new day would never start and her cheeks would remain forever young. Even the small amounts of yellow light shafting through her windows were enough to whither her blind. Like twin grim reapers time and light had always been there, every day, and although it was too soon, much too soon, to acknowledge the odors as anything more than pre-pre-menopausal angst, there was no escaping the persistence of the cursed sun and its light in this evanescent life.
“There’s no denying that it’s the damn sun and its daughters, time and light, that make the skin wrinkle and remind us of our mortality,” another delightful gem hung bloat-fully in the twilight of her untiring mind. If no sun, then no light, and no time.
She loved the beautiful way she had discovered to pass her time away, pretty much every day, since she had nothing else to do and her husband was simply too dumb to keep up with her way of thinking.
Was it the passing of time that brought to light the rising sun, or was it the light of the sun that measured the passing pulse of time? Light had a pulse as it daily arched across the heavens, and time had a measured beat to Sharon’s heart and both were heartless half-breeds, she was pissed. And the villain of the lot was the seething bastard sun. Sharon had begun to dislike the sun with its life sucking light as the harbinger of the inevitable death climax. The sun and its light were not the source of life, as the silly scientists would have us believe, she cleverly denied its importance.
In the beginning there was the Word … no!
In the beginning there was light …
The silliness of the claim astounded her as she lay in her bed. She had put on her silk kimono and she tucked it between her legs to feel sexy. In a fetal position, she was also sucking her thumb. Light definitely had to come after the beginning, she thought, because if there had been no beginning, then, there could not have been light. Light, then, must have been preceded by time. Time, a beginning, then, light! So, time was first and light was second. Unless, of course, light is the beginning in the sense that it comes before all other things, which essentially means there was nothing but a void, which means there’s no beginning, or anything else in a void but an endless nothing. All this, naturally, revolved, like the sun itself, around the existence of life since without life there is neither time nor light. Unless, of course, light and time were the same, which Sharon was now
inclined to believe that they were.
You could go crazy with such thoughts, she thought. Sometimes things that don’t make sense seem very clear to an unassuming mind. Speaking of unassuming, she thought of Claudio, but the stupid ass quickly disappeared
The beginning is much more inconceivable than the ending, she continued. As if the melding of time and light was the answer to anything. Everybody knows the ending.
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