8:42pm October 9, 2014

But time’s too damn unkind.

They’re all right. And they’re all wrong.

Donna Williams wrote her song “Still Awake” after a horrible event in her life. She had fallen in love with a woman, had finally realized this, and wanted to let the woman know that she loved her… only to get a call saying the woman had died instantly of an aneurysm. And so she wrote a song, the chorus of which went:

“Time is a thief that steals the chances that we never get to take. It steals them while we are asleep. Let’s make the most of it while we are still awake.”

Meanwhile, I have a Phideaux song going through my head, that also has to do with time. It’s a repeating theme:

“All you need is time. But time recedes behind.”
“But all we need is time. All we need is time. But time retreats behind.”
“Through the eye of time go I. Through the eye of time go I.”
“All we need is time. All we need is time. But time’s too damn unkind.”

And I have to admit, that last one is striking way too much of a chord right now. Time’s too damn unkind. Time is what I want, time is what I need, time to say goodbye, time to say everything I ever wanted to say, time to find out everything I ever wanted to know. But most of all, time to be there with him, time to be there, time to experience who my father is, time to experience him while he’s still alive.

But time’s too damn unkind.

Except… it’s not like that, and I know deep down it’s not like that at all. Time is not unkind. And time doesn’t work the way the people who write songs like this think it does. And time doesn’t work the way I feel like it does when I listen to songs like this and think “Time is too damn unkind.”
Because time actually gives us an eternity with our loved ones. Time makes it so that anything and anyone that has ever existed, can never be un-existed. You can die, but you can’t stop having existed. There’s a huge difference. And the way I normally see things, when my judgement isn’t clouded, dead people are just in a different part of time I can’t reach. So are people who will be alive after I am dead. Some people’s time overlaps and some people’s time doesn’t overlap.

And there’s also things outside of time, but that becomes quite difficult to talk about in language. But those things are incredibly important too. Because if there’s anywhere we can be said to ‘go’ when we die, it’s somewhere outside of time. And death isn’t the only way to perceive outside-of-time. Love is definitely outside of time. But again. This stuff is hard enough to talk about when you have words for it, and I don’t.

The songs are right, emotionally, for a person stuck in a confused version of time. They’re wrong, for what time actually is. But right now, it feels like time’s too damn unkind.