Author S. K. Nicholas

In the blink of an eye the veil was lifted, and for the first time in your life, you saw people not as ideas, or as permanent beings, but as bones with flesh wrapped around them. Endless bags of bones drifting around as if they had all the time in the world when in reality they were just riding their luck. In the time it takes to brush your teeth, you know that tomorrow it could be you. That despite all that you’ve got to give, the cruel hand of fate could pluck you up and crush you out of existence. There are so many things yet to be done. So many words that remain unuttered. But what if there was no future? What if it didn’t end when you were old and grey, but within the next few months? Other people get ill, you think, not you, but what if you became that other person? What if time began to tick down when you were only just getting started? Would you tell the truth, or take it to the grave? Would you open up and love until the final moments, or keep it in through fear? As you lower the toothbrush and look at yourself in the bathroom mirror, you feel smaller than an atom. As you stand there gazing at yourself in silence, you want to run until you lose yourself in the arms of the one you love, but instead, you crawl into bed and hide beneath the sheets. Clamping your eyes shut even though it’s hard because of the tears you’ve been crying, you try so hard to escape, but there’s no escape, not from this. It can’t be, you say. This can’t be happening, but it is. The real is unreal, and the unreal as stark and as potent as a bullet from a gun. We are visitors. We are transient. If it were to end so cruelly, wouldn’t you want to grab that love of yours and pull them under the sheets with you? Wouldn’t you ignore every useless thing and hold them so they could kiss away your tears? Love. It can’t defeat death, and nor can it cheat time, but it’s the nearest thing we’ll ever get to being eternal, and it’s the only thing we should ever concern ourselves with because it goes beyond all that we know. There is no other mystery that comes close.