Left behind

It is almost near the end of 2009. After all December started two days ago already. Radio, TV, everything or everywhere blazingly reminds you of the end of a year. The beginning was just there; I remember lamenting on the loss of 2008 as clearly as it were yesterday and now it’s déjà vu all over again. Time continues to be oscillating out of control despite of what people claim that it slows down when the children are grown. After all these years of hoping and waiting, I am beginning to think it is not going to happen anytime soon.

For working people like me, December is a mixture of joy and sorrow, hope and disillusion. The joy and hope is mostly related to the two holidays entitled to us and the sorrow-disillusion is multi-fold. There are obligations and demands to meet, parties to plan or attend, and above all after-the-light emptiness to face. A born pessimist, I look beyond the fun and grieve all the way such that most of the time I never meet the fun. On the 3rd day of December, I am well ahead of everyone, sitting there at the empty tree already with a hole in my heart and mournfully staring at the clock to see those two hands meet, shutting another year tight behind us. To me no enemy is more powerful than time itself. It outruns and overthrows forces of any form. It wounds and it also heals. I think I spend all my life struggling with this giant beast, wishing it away and when it does grieving for its passing. As I dread the end of a year, I abhor birthdays with the same intensity. What time fails to do to me is the changing inside. There has not yet reconciliation between the one inside and the one outside. It is usually not until those eyes meet each other at the mirror that I realize the inconsistency of those two beings. My look says I am altering every day, but my heart still belongs to a restless 15-year-old that seems to be totally out of place.

I have a sister that is older than me by merely 1 year and yet different from me as night to day. Every once in a while we would groan together about growing old. I think she does that just to be polite or supportive. Her most amazing remark or wisdom about this common enemy of ours is: next year I am growing even older, my body will be weaker, my hair will be grayer, so I am going to make the best of this younger me today! I cannot imagine any truth more simple and profound than this. Her enthusiasm affected me for a day or at best two. Then I return to be the very confused downer, struggling and fighting with my daemon all over again.

Does time really do anything to someone like me? One coworker of mine here is young enough to be my daughter. We have had conversations with roles totally reversed. I may possess the old school work ethics or more general life experience, the wiser one, however, is never me. I marvel at how people, young or old, think and act their age, taking life as it is. The ghost of the past or future does not haunt them. They move along with time while I am left behind. It’s a terrifying feeling to be the one awake and alone in a dark night searching for the door out.

28 more days to go and time as well as the world will be drifting even farther by a ceremonial one digit away. This old bag of mine is indeed riding along on the same boat, but my soul remains still. When that ball drops, I have yet only one hope – that one day these two will finally and surely meet at the end of sunset, where this restless soul finds her match and rests. Moreover, how blissful it will be when my Maker avenges for me and this life-long enemy, time, will no longer exist….