Time Times Three

Me and Richard are close. We know each other real well, but we don't talk much. Mostly we use eye contact. Not much more is needed. Sometimes, however, when we are both very mellow, he'll tell me things.

He once told me he would like to erase all of his personal history. I don't have any personal history so it's hard for me to understand that. Humans can recall memories from years and years ago. Some humans can even remember things when they were baby humans. Imagine that!

Us dogs, maybe, can remember what happened yesterday, maybe not. Anyway, one day while we were both in a zone, Richard told me about some stuff happened many decades ago.

I only knew her for a short while so many years ago. I thought she was mysterious, and she wanted me to think that about her. But I really knew she was just a little girl pretending to be a mysterious woman.

She lived in a one-room cottage next to a tall tree. Sometimes when I came over to see her at night we would go for walks. She always wore a red cape, I guess to make her seem even more mysterious. We never talked much. We lived in an existential bubble too fragile to endure for more than a few weeks. After she left me, she married a young man and bore him two sons. Her marriage eventually failed, and I lost track of how she fared. I wonder how she is now.

M any decades ago he moved with his wife and child to the Southwest where I lived. We almost instantly became best friends. We worked together and after work enjoyed shooting pool and drinking beer at a local bar. We also enjoyed hiking in the desert. We shared many memorable experiences.

After a couple of years, he left his wife and child for a young woman he had fallen in love with. They moved to the Midwest, and I never saw him again. Shortly after they moved I got a call from his new wife. She told me he had been killed in a motorcycle accident. I did not cry; I was just numb. Even now, in the twilight of my life, I can see his face, or what I remember his face to look like. I still grieve for him. Is my grief just for a memory?

S he was a prisoner I once knew. She had no family or friends. I came to see her when I had free time from my work. We sat in the courtyard and talked about this and that, never about the past or future - she had no future, and she certainly didn't want to discuss her past.

We both enjoyed our talks. I'm sure she looked forward to them, if nothing else, than to break the monotony of her daily routine. After a couple of years I moved away and never saw her again. She was older than me, so I'm sure she is dead by now, probably buried in a pauper's grave on the grounds of the prison where she lived. I sometimes wonder if she was real or just an elaborate nexus of cells in my brain.

The passage of time blurs those and many other memories so much that it becomes difficult to know if any of them truly represents events in the past. So how far have I traveled? A mile? A thousand miles? A million miles? Perhaps no more than an inch or two.

As I stand here looking out, what do I see? That which I think I know, or perhaps that which I thought I knew, or maybe even that which I may know. Then what is time? We live within it, depend upon it, deny it, and refuse to accept that we are bound by it. Can we exist outside of time, living in an eternal moment that merely changes within itself?

As I stand here looking in, I see nothing. There is only emptiness, and it is reassuring, like the comfort only a loving mother can provide.