Day 188 - Recollections Story

Recollections Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Thad was unaware of the Arrow of Time theory. He knew nothing of entropy or the measurements of the second law of thermodynamics and how the increase of entropy over time could be viewed as a distinction of the past from the future. Thad was largely unaware of time passing in any direction. From his perspective certain things happened. That was it. They just happened. No order. No causality. No direction. No evolution or growth or epiphanies to learn from. To him, time was like a shuffled deck of cards, where any card could be drawn from the deck at any time, in any order, and once that moment of time was experienced, the deck was then reshuffled, so there was always some small chance of re-experiencing the same moment of time, two times in a row.

Thad had no idea how many times he had repeated certain moments. It was so often that he couldn’t count them all. He lived and relived hundreds and thousands of moments. Over and over and over again. To him that was life and that was how existence worked. Moments. Key moments. He was made up of certain key moments, but he didn’t know why he perceived them the way he did or what he was supposed to glean from them after seeing them. Without a context as to how things happened or why things were the way they were, it all just seemed like a random shuffle or a schizophrenic hodgepodge of chaotic visions.

Thad had his key moments. One way of looking at his collection of events was that they were a life. His life had been, and would be, mere moments. He had events. Many of them repeated. Many of them unexplained. If there was supposed to be anything in between, it came out to him as a blank. He supposed he was supposed to know what happened in those blank moments. He could think and dwell, but the blank slate never filled. How was memory supposed to work? How was he supposed to know something happened? If time was an arrow, then other moments must have taken place. Millions of moments to fill in all the blanks. An infinite amount of moments. But he remembered none of them. He lost track of almost all of what must have been the rest. He assumed he had experienced them, but he couldn’t prove it. If time was an arrow and moved forward, then he must have lived those moments. But they were nothing, as if nothing at all had ever happened in them. He didn’t remember life or time like a story from ‘A’ to ‘B’ to ‘C.’ There was no forward progression. There were detours and repeats and circles inside of circles. He would get caught in a series of moments and relive them again and again.

Time was supposed to work to tell a story. Time was supposed to put things together in a neat little order, in a neat little package, so that everything made sense. Thad had no order, so he had no story. Thad didn’t know he was supposed to conceive of himself in such a way. He conceived of himself existing in moments. He didn’t know what story they told. If there were outside observers, there was no linear plot to be seen or lesson to be learned, and Thad would appear to have no meaning.

Thad existed presently. The only thing that existed was the present. Everything was the present to him. He didn’t remember the past or the future. He didn’t remember to remember. He didn’t know to remember. The present was always taking place. Everything was always taking place. He could live a million moments all at the same time, some moments repeated a million times over, and all of them were able to happen all at once. Everything seemed like the here and now. He had seen death. He had seen life. He had seen himself young and old and everything in between. And yet he experienced them all, as if they were happening now.

Thad knew he would cease to exist. He had seen it. It had happened, and it would happen, and it was happening now. He didn’t exist. And he did. He didn’t know which was right. They were both right. He saw them both and didn’t know how he was supposed to reconcile the two.

Thad’s mind existed somewhere outside the confines of the existence of time. He didn’t know to think about that. He didn’t know to wonder where or how his body was. His existence was without time, but that didn’t mean his body possessed such benefits.

Moments were lost and Thad had no idea what that meant. He wished he could see what was gone. He wished he had that knowledge. He didn’t know why he wished that, but that was the way it was. He shouldn’t have cared. The moments weren’t real to him, so he shouldn’t have cared.

Somewhere the sands of time slipped by and the grains were washed away and the moments of his life existed but didn’t exist. Somewhere the ravages of time took their toll on Thad’s body, whether his mind knew it or not. Somewhere he existed, despite how he perceived it. And somewhere he would cease to exist and then it all really would be lost.