time

It’s been ages, these past months. Has it been years? Wander the same halls. Same as your childhood. Same as when the cracks in life began to show. Same as now, all alone. Alone, struck blind. Alone, surrounded with mementos left by others. Everything that’s “yours” has been neatly sequestered away. In “your” room. In other rooms as well, caked in infinite dust by time.

But these are not memories you yourself recall. It is only in a book -- written by a past self you do not know. A book you can scarcely even read. But even picking it up, it makes your very skin crawl. Your heart begins to race. You can hear the faint tick-tock of time gone. Your own mortality. So you put the book down. You always put it down. No matter what. You can’t hold it. It burns you with truths you might never be ready to embrace.

Endless labyrinthine halls. It’s as though this house could entrap you forever. Perhaps it already has. How do you know how long it’s been? How long has passed? Have you been here for years not knowing who you are? Only a name. A name given to a monster. Haven’t you heard the whispers? They say you can pass through walls, that you abduct people, never to let them return, that you stare into their very souls. But that’s nonsense. Your eyes haven’t stared at anything. Not now, not ever. How can you stare with eyes that never open?

You don’t want to entertain the idea that they could be right. Your wants are inconsequential. You live what they say you live. You are a monster. A monster so deeply wracked by this half-existence, that you’ve been trying for this entire day (perhaps even longer) to find one specific trinket.

You’ve entered every room you can think of. To find the source of a ticking noise. Not the grandfather clocks. Those only bother you when you realize they’re there. No, this is ticking from something you cannot find the source of. Every room projects it at the same exact volume. A small, faint noise. Tailor made by the people who used to live here to drive you mad. The repetition of it all, a reminder that you are finite. Perhaps you will never find out, before the clock claims you.

Dust is thrown all about. You frantically open an ancient trinket chest, clearly ages and ages older than you. Take every object out. None of them tick. Enter the next room. Repeat. Until the whole house is exhausted.

It’s getting louder now. It consumes your every thought. You cannot hear yourself over the cloud hanging over your essence. It’s coming for you. You have to escape. You can’t stay here. Forcefully shove the front door open, and run. Run from your mortality, from time. It can’t catch you. Or else you too will disappear, just like everybody else. Run into the fogbound woods, try desperately to find someone. At least a whisper of a person who’s been there. Someone who hasn’t vanished, been consumed by the woods.

Time will catch you. It will force you to realize your existential limit. One way or another, it will find you. You cannot escape it.