mirror glance

He asked about the future the other day. I had no answer. It is the first time perhaps that I’m caught off guard to such an inquiry. I’m trying to pinpoint exactly when the moving forward of time stopped for me. Of course I am propelled into the present every day when I wake up and go through the daily motions of work, the monthly necessary appointments, the yearly rituals of the holidays. One might call it living in the present but I somehow feel even slightly detached from that. It is easy to differentiate the past, a place long off. The present and future are not so distinct.

“For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who can even comprehend it in thought or put the answer into words? Yet is it not true that in conversation we refer to nothing more familiarly or knowingly than time? And surely we understand when we speak of it; we understand it also when we hear another speak of it.

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know…how is it that there are the two times, past and future, when even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet?”(1)

Nearly 3 years past since I wrote the following: There still lies a distance between their gazes. He sees her & she sees him. Little by little they grow closer. Closer in love. Closer in thought. Closer in word. She looks into her magical one-eyed box hoping to see a future where that distance has been eliminated. The mirror whispers an answer into her ear saying, "Yes...yes...the time is fast approaching and it will be of lasting proportions..." She smiles. Her heart is happy and in the near distance she sees the smile on his lips. His smile reveals to her that the mirror has also told him of the very same secret.

Three years, and that small glimpse into the future (now past) has proven itself true in every way. Now if only I could again find that magic box and mirror that would divulge another glance into the present future (a glance captures more than a glimpse).

(1) from St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book xi, Chapter xiv entitled “Neither Time Past nor Future, But the Present Only, Really Is.”