How Soon Is Now?

A cool night on the slide toward summer. Just unseasonable enough to be mistaken for fall. In brief moments like these, when the two seasons reveal themselves as the mirror twins they are, I always feel a bit uneasy, as if I'd mistaken dusk and dawn.

Which is how I'd come to be sitting in the dark, staring at the silent heavens and thinking about time. The air like chilly fingers creeping up my spine. 

An old memory comes drifting in from some far-off place - the first time I'd heard that song by the Smiths, and how it sounded not only like loneliness, but loss. 

It occurs to me now that the question in the title was never answered. 

All Is Void

Another year on the planet. Time scrolls out behind me in a seamless flow. Just moments ago, it seems, I was a child, a wild creature; beyond good and evil, beyond gender, even. Just pure existence in the fresh morning air. 

In many ways I feel no different than I did then, only that the world forces me into this shape or that shape and so little of it has to do with my true shape at all. 

Now we are here, watching the last flare up before the flame out of the old order, the one that refused to step aside to let the new take its place. The seamless flow halts for a moment, and I wonder what the shape of the new world will be. The future is a void, the story yet unwritten, but I'm old enough at last not to be afraid.