Every
Present is a Past/ Every Past is a Present
She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk
through the door. In the morning people
would know what she had done.
“It doesn’t really matter
anymore,” she thought to herself, “Sometimes a person just has to walk away.”
Even this thought didn’t overcome her fear, her regrets… her pain. Her past,
the smiles and tears alike, seemed to be a mere fiction. She felt the present,
as she had never felt it before, this one brief moment, being borne back into
the past. She couldn’t help but chuckle with derision… the past. What is the
present but that which is continually dying. There is no present but the
eternal recurrence of the same. She was suddenly aware that the unnerving
feeling of déjà vu was simply due to
the fact that no present can escape its own past. The dying away of the
present, the ‘now’ which is always already the ‘not anymore’ , this was the
only future to which she might look forward.
Past. Present. Future. Did these words even have meaning? Perhaps
the past was all that is, and all that ever can be. She thought back over her actions of the past
24 hours, and of her actions over the past 3 months. “He had it coming,” she
reminded herself. She had done only what she knew to do. Nobody would fully
understand what she had done… nobody could. She didn’t understand. She had been
thrown into this situation, but she wasn’t entirely sure how, and couldn’t even
contemplate the possibility that there might be a why. Is there ever a
why? We live, we act, occasionally we
think. She had to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
With absurdity on her mind, she
picked up the book again. She leafed
through the pages with no interest in the words therein. He had been given the
book, but refused to read anything that didn’t, in his mind, justify his own
stupidity. He was convinced that he was in the right, that the entire world
revolved around him. Of course, he couldn’t have admitted this; he couldn’t
even have thought it. “He had it coming,” she reminded herself once more. Some
people think that a person is like an onion: a person must strip away the outer
layers to find the core, the heart of a person, the soul. She laughed yet again. Of course, a person is like an onion. Each
and every one of us is a series of layers, but, the reality that is tragically
ignored is simply that a person has no core.
When the layers of a person, just like those of an onion, are stripped
away, nothing remains. Her mind was again dragged to thoughts of the past,
whatever that meant. She saw clearly how
each and every decision of her life, each fleeting present, had given her a new
layer.
She gingerly returned the book to the table,
careful not to disturb the quiet of the room. She stood up and walked toward
the door. With one final glance around
the room she prepared to leave for good. As the door creaked open she was
filled with hope. The present was already passing away; it would be replaced with a seemingly
infinite series of presents in the future. Perhaps the future is not entirely
dictated by the past. Even the past was only what she made of it. With a smile
she stepped through the door, and, swinging it closed behind her, she said to nobody
in particular, “I’m better off right now.”