The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

So yeah, it’s Theme Thursday again. What’s more, it’s kind of relevant to where my head has been as of late. I say kind of because it is one degree of separation removed from the today’s theme, but well within the spirit!

So tell me, dear reader, what is the first thing that comes to mind when I say “CLOCK”?

If you’re wired like me, you’ll be sagely scratching your chin, suppressing a tear and muttering to yourself “TIME”.

TIME.

There is rarely enough of it.

I took the above photo the Wednesday before last. I was sitting in the front passenger side of the car, on the Gordon’s Hill Road/East Derwent Highway intersection.

The connection that this photo engenders to me with the concept of time is somewhat ambiguous. When I look at this sky, awash as it is with colour as day bleeds into night prompts a very specific memory, albeit of a sky in a different place and separate context.

I have an incredibly vivid recollection of swimming in the ocean under a similar sky. Of course, that sky was a little more orange, a little pinker, it was summer, and it was up in the North West of Tasmania, not the South East.

The memory itself is vivid, albeit nothing particularly out of the ordinary – swimming during an electrical storm, the sound of thunder rolling when you stick your head under the water, that kind of thing – the thing is though, as I’m thinking this, it seems like yesterday.

But it wasn’t yesterday.

So in my head, I’m like “three years...?”

No.

FIFTEEN YEARS.

Fifteen years and it seems like yesterday.

Ezra will have his first birthday next month. It seems like last week!

Henry is two and a half.

I’ve been together with Jen for EIGHT years.

I’ve live in Hobart for THIRTEEN YEARS.

It’s a blink of an eye.

On this spectrum, at this rate, I’ll be dead NEXT WEEK.

Not next week in a linear, temporal sense, but next week in a sense of how time appears to me. How time come and how time goes.

I’m scared.

I want to cry.