a quest for time >> by robert delamar >> *spark-online.com >> issue ten, july 2000

So, I've done it. Relocated. Changed my life. I was languishing at home in a go-nowhere job. School sucked. What to do? Well, motion is always an option when the world is in stasis. Now I'm here.

It was the perception of wasted time that was the impetus. Time is an unyielding beast. Its persistent drone as omnipresent as the sunshine and moonlight that it is measured by.

Enough damned time. A struggle more Herculean than a bloody Cyclops. How can I get more?

Space: 8 ft. by 8 ft.

I left a city by the ocean for a valley near a city near the ocean. I grew up in a valley near a city by the ocean. Now I've returned.

A memory of past time.

My bedroom. Shared with my younger brother. Clothes piled parallel to the bottom bunk. Step, compress, and "wow" one had a futon before futons were beds.

Recherché.

Now I inhabit a sparse grey space--a cubicle not much larger than my childhood room. Somehow it's much lonelier. Sure, I have a computer (upon which I write this trite chronology). A machine for making music. A photograph of my wife. Some drawers. A chair.

My childhood bedroom was much fuller. It housed two brothers. The valley of my childhood was wider; the mountains were taller.

My adult cubicle is empty. It houses only a shadow of me. The valley of my adulthood is narrower; the mountains are really hills.

Now my time is clocked and remunerated for simply passing. When I was a child I was certain time was infinite (Oh, how I wondered what would happen when I was grown!). I never dreamed it would become a commodity. How can one measure riches by the shadow of the sun?

Perhaps that's why the wealthiest die young. Everywhere the demands on the time of our rich young rulers are punishing (in the Ancient Near East, or the Modern Wild West). Though they may acquire much as the result of their efforts, the net result is an early passing.

Time: Dream Question

And always there are questions.

Where do I go? Why should I go? Why go at all?

Where will "this time" take me?

I'm dreaming now.

I was dreaming and this is the conscious resuscitation of that dream.

I am home.

Home is the place where I am loved and those that I love are.

The place I love.

I see sunshine dip away, through a picture window, over the apex of the mountains.

A sunset.

I see the moon rise over the crest of yet another apex, this at the opposite end of my valley.

A moonscape.

And the night becomes the morning.

And you are there with me.

Denouement: Return

When I return I will have gained perspective about life and why.

Like any myth.

A story in search of time.

This mine.

Robert Delamar is currently living and working away from home. He's obviously homesick. He is the Managing Editor of *spark-online.

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