Many have tried to outsmart, defy, and name her. Believing if they can make sense of her, they can make sense of themselves. They bind her to calendars, divide her into numbers, hours and years. She’s grown amused with the human desire to bargain, delay and plead while she slips through their grasp. They always fail, but this does not deter them. She is all that we are not. Her mere existence reveals true human weakness, our inevitable defeats. She continues steadily on, setting the rulebook we all must follow.
Today she visits three.
She finds the actress gazing upon her own reflection, a brush trembling in her hand. Carefully, she smears on a second skin over her weathered face. She fills her gaping pores, and paints her cheeks a deep cherry red.
Her eyes have grown tired of analyzing the woman that greets her each morning; finding flaws that no other eyes can see. She sticks needles under her skin, drinks magic serums, and shoves pills down her throat by the dozen.
With each candle placed on her cake, she, she…she avoids the sun and the sea, the elements that once touched her freely. But they are not the true culprits.
Your illusion is convincing. She smirks. The world believes your youth has been preserved, that you have mastered the art of delay, but you have failed to fool me.
“I can be painted and powdered, with nothing earned I can be chased, but never caught”
And with that, She continues on her way. Leaving the actress to claw at her own skin; cursing the passing years as blemishes emerge on her face.
She finds the scholar in a dimly lit room, hunched over a desk in a cracked leather chair. It’s two shades too light in the middle, where his body has left its mark. His ill-fitting glasses slip low on the bridge of his nose, revealing deep creases in his brow. The walls of his study are lined with ancient maps and books full of unsolved questions. His ink-stained hand scribbles speculations on empty pages, desperate to find answers where none exist. He writes as if precision alone can save him. If he can understand, he can gain control. If he can gain control, he can escape the inescapable. So here he sits. Alone in this chair, while his hair has thinned, his bones have grown brittle, his daughter has become a mother.
Your pursuits are noble, she muses. But while you tried to define me I never stopped moving.
“I can be studied for centuries, but never learned. I can be measured, but never bought.”
She drifts past the scholar—leaving him to decompose like the dusty stacks of paper in his endless cave of questions.
She finds the priest kneeling on a worn red cloth, calling her by another name. A rosary bites his palm as he whispers rehearsed rhymes to salvage suffering souls. His congregants trade him their secrets for his key to some great divine. They place control in the hands of their Father to deny the powerlessness over their own fate. Their greatest fears and deepest loves lie in a small black box-the names of the sick, the dying, and the already gone. They believe his words travel upward. He believes it, he must.
Your prayers are misplaced but true, she reasons. It is me whose name you should cry out.
“I can be spent, I can be wasted; but not returned.
I disappear with each passing thought”
No mirror can deceive Her, no page can prove Her, no prayer can quell Her. She leaves only one thing up to us:
how we spend what little She gives.
I can be painted and powdered, with nothing earned.
I can be chased, but never caught
I can be studied for centuries, but never learned
I can be measured but never bought
I disappear with each passing thought
I can be spent, I can be wasted, but not returned.
What am I?▲
