The Time Will Pass Anyways
My haunting vision of the future.
When I am six feet underground and the moss has covered my tombstone, I hope that whoever gets to me first, whether it be the fungi or the bugs or the rot, looks at my shiny hair, the long lengths down to my hips, and thinks, She is beautiful.
It is a strange thing to hope for, to want to be seen when I can no longer return the gaze. To be admired for a quality I do not yet possess. And yet, the desire has plagued me long before the grave.
I have a vision of myself in the distant future, and it blooms in my mind like the oak tree leaves outside my window. It may disappear for a time, but only to rush to the forefront of my consciousness in its season. I am older in this dream, wiser perhaps. In many ways I am the same: the same slender shoulders and bony hands, the same chocolate eyes and cobby brows. But in this way, I am different. My hair is long and silky - it dances around my waist and swirls in soft umber ringlets at my fingertips. No longer does it lay limply at my collarbones, no, in the future it is shiny and bouncy and almost alive.
Dreams of the future unnerve me. I prefer to take life like stepping stones over a babbling brook. One at a time, stepping when I’m sure, trusting no one other than myself, my movement, and my mind. Such is the case with this dream - it haunts me not because it beckons me forward, or illuminates the path ahead, but because it requires nothing of me, only the passage of time.
If I cannot reshape time, I will at least shape the body it carries me in. I eat what I believe I should. I move my body in a manner that promises longevity, fitness, acceptance, beauty. I make the daily trek toward validation. It is a long and twisted road, a path forged by sharp corners and serpentine shapes that never allow me to see more than a few steps ahead. I blaze this trail in search of something. Exactly what, eludes me.
For I cannot see the light at the end of this tunnel. There’s no green beacon across the bay for me now. Only a hazy dream of hair longer than the road I now travel.
It will not matter then, just as it does not matter now, for beauty is confined to this earth. Once I have passed beyond this realm’s reach, beauty will absolve itself of me. I will surrender it to what is left of my brief existence here. Perhaps it will survive me, even for only a cursory spell. Perhaps it will be consigned to my memory, or to the minds of those who knew me. Or perhaps it will vanish entirely, falling flat without my punitive efforts to pillar it.
So why do I make myself suffer so?
This dream of mine is hardly a dream at all. Dreams are meant to motivate - to move, to stimulate, to inspire. It is dreams that have given us music, that have given us art; dreams that have brought change, revolution, and rescue. They are what we memorialize in print, what we invoke in times of tribulation. They are what we turn to when the voices of the saints past no longer sing.
This vision is not a dream, because it asks nothing of me. It does not urge me forward or dare me to become. It does not reward effort or punish neglect. It will arrive, or it won’t. Either way, it will operate on its own time, indifferent to my discipline, my suffering, my devotion. I am not its architect. I am only its witness.
That is what unsettles me most: that the thing I covet cannot be earned. It cannot be chased into submission or shaped by will. It is governed by time, by chance, by the slow and private negotiations of the body with the world. I may tend myself carefully, lovingly even, and still be denied it. Beauty, after all, is not loyal. It visits, it lingers, and it leaves.
I know this because beauty has never promised permanence. It belongs to the living, to the warm, the breathing, the seen. It does not follow us underground. It loosens its grip the moment we do. And yet I spend my days trying to hold it still, as if reverence alone could make it stay.
The hair I dream of, the kind that glows from within, the kind that effortlessly falls into place in waves like the boughs of a willow tree, it is not earned through any resolve or will of man. It is granted only to the patient.
This world is so obsessed with control. My life is a testament to it, and beauty is only a symptom of it. What else are we told but to work with what we have, to make the most of it all, because fortune favors the bold!1 Because success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out!2 Because nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.3 But so much of this life is fleeting, so much of it undeserved, so much of it impossible to account for. Suffering and joy, cruelty and rewards - all unexpected, all ephemeral.
So I wait. I suffer. I polish what time will one day reclaim. Not because I believe it will last, but because growth isn’t promised, and the time will pass anyways.
The Seventh Rule of Sophistry: To act is simple; to endure is rare.
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According to Pliny the Elder.
In the words of Robert Collier.
Says Booker T. Washington.
Your voice is just lovely!
Absolutely beautiful read!! Written soo well!!🩷🩷