Strike of the Drum Against the Silence of Time

It's hard to say how time passes.
Marked by pain, by joy, by numbness. Or is it the silences between? I know not.
I suppose it could be measured out in songs and memories, the things we like best in life, at least that's desirable. But what do we keep? What is ours to keep? What is right to keep?
Coffee, I suppose. Or beer.
I have many questions and increasingly I find fewer and fewer answers, always living by the skin of my balls, hoping incessantly to be correct about something, to feel right in this life.

I feel most often like a plucked string; first the burst and sting followed by an expectant silence, waiting for the next note, though nobody can be sure there would ever be another. Yet we love music so dearly. As in life, we hold onto so many things, but I don't believe we keep any of it. Not a single thing.
And in a way it kills me. To think that we cannot keep the look in a lover's eye, or the taste of childhood candy, or the touch of a dog's fur. Call it sentimental; in fact call it whatever you want, because it floats away like cat hair on the wind along with even your criticism and your memory and your life's work. Bastard. I'm not the first to say that beauty is what it is because it disappears so quickly and the things we love in this life are no different. We are organic matter headed back in the direction from which we came, into a dark place where nothing else can hurt us.

In that way, losing it all is freeing. Nothing holds us back and what we do with it is completely ours and for all the terrible things that happen day in and day out we have the potential to put one foot in front of the other and move towards the place in front of us. There is no pattern. Rhymes are dead. Reasons are subjective.
Coffee, I suppose. Or beer.

We are the turns of the pendulum, the perpetual motion at its stopping point, just before it falls back toward the center - suspended there for as long as we can, the briefest of moments and gone. Terrified of falling the entire time.

What we come away with in the end is incredibly isolated inside the labyrinth within the mind. An old man never wants to look back and see all the impunity he barely managed. Though it was probably the most thrilling part of it all, he wants to remember his children and the smell of his wife's neck and his father's home and his favorite place to go to watch the sky.

Our lives are so much larger inside us, while outside we just want to eat.

So that is how time passes, one chew at a time, until we've got it all soft enough to swallow. The watch ticking as we stand on the bridge, looking down at the water and wondering where it all went.

Just keep chewing.