I gazed at the window and the grey, dour clouds outside reminded me of a stereotypical nun, the snow her headdress, trailing chaotically behind her.  The eddies of snow and wind were increasing in their entropy. Bringing my focus back to the dishes, I stared down and (my hands have rabies) marveled at the soapy suds obscuring my hands, listening to the bubbles pop lightheartedly, letting it drift through my ears. From the hallway, illuminated only by a weak, bronze light, came the padded footsteps of the Siamese cat, its Oriental eyes shining within the monochromatic shadows of the room. More and more I found myself drifting….only dimly aware of the muted happenings of the house. It was always in the nights, the twilights, anytime the sun exited center stage, when I felt that familiar duality of unease and a sort of melancholic calm. The clock on the wall, after all of these years, its mahogany body molding, slowly decomposing, kept a steady yet fragile ticking, like that of an elderly man. This, the creaking of the wooden floorboards, the howling nun outside, laid itself bare upon my brain, to absorb into a dreary fugue. In that dimly-lit room, under the steady, slight cascade of the tap, I pondered the sundry items entering my mind-in need of some inventory, but tossed them all in a dead end, miscellaneous recycle bin.
     It felt strange to say the least, to feel my mind fall away from the order that the world burdens us with everyday of our lives. Only a minute handful ever seems to escape its grip for any more than a length of five or ten minutes. We are always bound by the mundane tasks that life deals out nonchalantly, like a magician performing an illusion (Now you see it, now you don’t). Perhaps my greatest source of unease came from allowing my feet to loosen their grip on the ground that secured me, and letting the blimp-sized balloons lift me up into some unknown firmament. But letting go finally seemed to put my brain to a lull, the kind only a few (artists and Zen masters alike) seem to be able to achieve. From my telescopic view and my now uncorked subconscious, I felt I could see everything fathomable to the human imagination.
     I continued washing, hearing the squeak of the clean dishes; their marble-white teeth grinning up at me. My thoughts were here only vaguely, like the background hum of an air conditioner in a crowded office. I mused over broad, philosophical topics like God and the afterlife, of humans, of chance, of life and death, a whole spectrum of thoughts, and I felt a sudden sort of enlightenment. I realized in full force, the briefness of life, crushing, almost deafening my senses-conscious or subconscious I could not tell. Why had I never fully comprehended, after 25 years on this earth? Of course 25 is equivalent in nature to a hard, green fruit, nowhere near mellow maturation, but add 25 more and you realize your 50, at the heart of middle-age (A middle aged chump with the underbelly of a whale, crow’s feet and parentheses lining your face). And the entirety of it is so futile to mask. Time and death… like the mafia, will always track you down, no matter what vain efforts you use in order to evade them.
     I marveled equally on how much of our existence is wasted. How many opportunities have we declined for things we thought, rightly or wrongly, were better for our circumstances? What could have been if we took another path or a detour? How many ‘what ifs?’ could we ask ourselves until we are left laying on our deathbed? How many times have we held back our tongue for good or for bad? How many feelings and thoughts have we caged inside ourselves, rather than voicing it aloud to the ones around us? I could not kid myself. I’ve heard it; everyone has more than enough times, that old age cliché warning us of the shortness of our being, like a quick exhalation of air, once out, always gone. We’ve heard almost to the point of exhaustion, how we should always tell our loved ones the things we dearly want to tell them out loud, the thoughts consuming us alive, but are too often swallowed back down in fear of embarrassment and appearing overemotional. Such is the vanity of human beings.  We have always given that cautionary advice because life is cruel, and more random than the swirling of the snow outside. God gives and God takes. Life now and death later. I could be standing here now, monotonously washing the plates and die of a heart attack, a stroke, a blood clot in my brain, or some unknown disease. Likewise, the ones dear to us can slip away like a fish caught in our bare hands. And although I (and the rest of the human race) am apt to excuse these thoughts with, “It can wait till tomorrow!” my fear is profound and far from surreal.
     Suddenly, in the midst of this haze, I could have almost sworn that in the lonely and still night, I could hear the earth, perhaps time itself pulsate. From the very depths of the earth, from the ‘mysterious cosmos’ as some may call it, from everywhere and nowhere at all, or perhaps from my own nervous heart, I heard the faint, few pulses of time, counting down the years, the months, days, all the way down to the milliseconds of our existence.
     Startled, I forced myself back from this unsettling warp, making my way back down the shaky bridge leading back into the logical world and leaving my journey behind. I returned into the security of my house, where the Siamese stared at me intently. I was back in the familiarity of this world, where the dynamic happenings distract us from our complex (and not quite dormant) inner landscape. Yet somehow, the fragments of my travel trace back even here and at times, on nights such as these, I remember that same heavy pulse of time. Do you hear it?