Time is relative.
Time is life’s great-grandfather who’s too old for anyone to remember when he was born and he should’ve gone years ago but we all know he never will. Time is the bully of the family; Time keeps Life on a too-tight leash, and when Life says, “Please, can I?” Time pulls him back inside and locks every door of the house. Life withers away trapped in Time’s fortress. “Don’t whine,” Time says, “there’s lots to do in here.” And Time might be right — for his house is a mansion — but it’s not enough. So long as mansions have doors and windows, there will always be somewhere else, and even the biggest somewhere is far from everywhere.
Most days, Life sits in the bay window in the middle of the parlor and stares through the glass, tracing dew as it slips down the panes and wishing his fingers could be touched by it. Time insists that there are things to be handled, but Life won’t leave the window; if he does, everything that would be disappears, and there is nothing without something that isn’t. So every morning, Life traces the dew and Time stands over him yelling, “Get up! Get up!” — but, you see? Life can’t.
The house isn’t big enough, Life thinks, so it’s not worth anything. Someday the window will crack, the door will open, and then Life can be outside and in.
“The window is closed,” says Time. “There is much to be done inside.”
Life will not move. “If I leave, I might miss when it opens.”
It will not open.
“Come now. There is much to be done,” Time insists.
“There is too much to be done,” Life responds. “I should never finish it all trapped in this house.”
So Life wastes away at the window, drawing his finger across the glass day by day, burning with the secret fear that he will never be significant.
