Fickle

The hole was five feet deep. Not that I measured or anything, I just knew it was deep enough that if I jumped down in it I might not get myself back out—and let’s just say I didn’t want to be found hours later curled at the bottom of their grandpa’s grave.  

Surprisingly for Idaho, the sun was shining, and I could hear the magpies in the bare branches of the towering oak behind me. Its roots stuck out into the sides of the grave, and spring hadn’t quite gotten to filling the branches with vibrant green sprouts yet. Normally I wouldn’t spend my free time in a cemetery, but sometimes life throws you curve balls.  

In a matter of hours, I knew that I’d be sitting on a bench, listening to the life sketch of a man I had never formally met. I couldn’t have expected then, sitting next to his hole, how many tears would fall before the end of the funeral. Who knew you could feel the loss so keenly of someone you didn’t know? And yet I did. In an inexplicable way, I felt connected to him, to his life, to his passions, to his posterity.  

Isn’t it funny how we’re individual and unique, yet we all end up the same? Lifeless. Dead. James Joyce described it as “becoming shades,” the Greeks explained it as crossing a river and entering another world, the unbelievers define it as an anticlimactic end. And somehow, we live without that bothering us. I get caught up in my textbooks and running and relationships, trying to avoid going to the grocery store while still eating something with nutritional value. I watch the students around me send snaps and take selfies and sum up reality into succinct tweets and status updates, all while the second hand on the clock on the wall seems to spin faster and faster. I’m afraid that I’ll blink and all of this will flash away.  

Time is fickle. Fickle in the sense that it’s not consistent. I swear the clock on the wall of my grammar class marches a few seconds slower than it should, and then goes double time when I take a study break. I can almost pretend time doesn’t exist when I’m hiking across sandstone in Southern Utah, but then the sun goes down and reminds me that I have to face reality again. There are never enough hours in the day but there are too many minutes in the hour, the weeks tick by while the months seem to fly. Didn’t it just snow yesterday? But the trees are full of new leaves and the birds are singing as if they were telling me of all the places I should be instead of where I actually am. And before I can blink again, it will be time for hot chocolate and pumpkin cookies and sweaters softer than sunshine.  

Sometimes I wonder why it matters. Why not let time pass? Why do I insist on grasping every grain of sand that falls out of the hourglass, even though I know it will just speed up? Why not let the water slip around me instead of attempting to hold back the current? 

Standing at the casket, I stared at his closed eyes. Every white hair was combed to the left, and his hands were neatly folded. Time is fickle. Before I know it, that will be me, stiff as a board and lifelessly waxy. What will I have done by then? Will anyone care? Will there be some stranger there, staring at my eyelids and climbing into my hole, only to find that he can't get out and that time is as disloyal to him as it is to the rest of us?