By Mike Johnson
Time and memory are illusion.
I remember watching the clock in elementary school.
During class, the clock crawled as if turning through molasses.
During lunch and recess, it spun like a window fan.
Each day was its own ordeal.
Its own torture.
Its own lifetime.
Somehow, I got through 1,200 of those days.
Today, they are just memory.
Like looking at a piece of granite encrusted with gemstones, individual moments still flash within the enormous, gray mundane.
But those days are over.
Passed.
Past.
Did they even occur?
Did I actually live them, or were the memories just implanted in my mind?
I can ask the same for my work history.
Six years of delivering newspapers morning and afternoon.
Friday and Saturday midnight shifts as a dishwasher.
Six years of shifts running the floor at McDonald’s.
Ten years of challenges running 7-Elevens.
Three years of 100-hour-weeks publishing a financially-doomed newspaper.
Six years of freelance writing.
Nine years as a trolley tour entrepreneur.
Seventeen years owning trailer parks.
Each moment, each hour, each shift, seemed so enormous at the time.
Now I hold them all at once, complete, in one corner of memory.
With baseball.
With bicycles.
With ping-pong.
With comic books.
With parents.
With travel.
With marriage.
With children.
With pets.
With grandchildren.
Without memory and a few keepsakes collected along the way, there is little proof any of this even occurred.
In the Star Trek episode, “The Inner Light,” Jean Luc Picard encounters an alien probe that shoots a beam into his head.
While his body lays unconscious on the bridge, his mind lives an entire lifetime as someone else.
He’s married, has children, a career and experiences the pain of watching his wife and planet slowly die.
Throughout this life, he plays the same haunting tune on a Ressikan flute.
At the end of that life, he’s taken to the launch of the probe that will find him a thousand years later.
His dead wife appears.
"The rest of us have been gone a thousand years. If you remember what we were, and how we lived, we will have found life again. Now we live in you. Tell them of us... my darling."
As Picard comes to on the bridge, disorientated, he asks how long he’s been unconscious.
“Twenty, twenty-five minutes,” he’s told.
“Twenty-five minutes!” he exclaims, the shortness inconceivable.
And this is me.
This is you.
One day we'll awaken from this earth dream and return to REAL life.
Time is an illusion that through unexplainable alchemy, turns into memory.
Neither can be touched.
Neither can be proven without keepsakes collected along the way.
As Picard stands alone in his ready room, shakily reorientating to his environment, his first officer enters.
“We found this in the probe.”
Picard opens the small box.
It’s the flute.
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More:
Why I'm Magnetized to This Railing
My Attempt to Be Jean Luc Picard
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