Ghosts of Time

The world wears its tumors well. Ridged and wrinkled lives all bleached clean for our oedipal coloring in. Each pair of hands a minor deity as it smears that ink across the pages it envies.

I sometimes envision time travel as a being. A grey shadow on the peripheral of our vision. Tinkering with our lives as old men often fidget with the junk in their garages. Slithering about our ankles as we walk. Staring from within our mirrors as we preen. That we would be less than nothing to them. A single tick of a second. Expired as quickly as we had dared to exist.

Empty outlines of chalk. Not unlike the ones we use to mark our dead. Painfully devoid of any features that could indicate they had once lived.

When I see these creatures. Their long grey tails courting the hungry wind. I wonder what they see through the eyes absent from their heads. Little ticks of demarcation telling the brief scald of our time. The fleeting stumble which shunts us from birth to death in an instant. A sinewy smoke of cancer through the guise of their infinite perspective.

Perhaps I was an hour. Maybe only a second. I look for their smile, but cannot find it. I listen for their snide laughter, but am greeted only by silence.

I comfort myself with the knowledge that there have always been these monsters. It's just only recently that I've begun to look for them.