Time is my enemy because when I want something to happen time is in the way. Time is always in the way.

I go to make myself a cup of tea in the morning and bang – there time is right up in my face. I’m standing there looking at the kettle wishing the time away. Freaking out about it. And it’s in no hurry to go away. It’s resisting me.  The more I wish the time away the more right up in my face it is, driving me mad with frustration. It’s like a solid wall and I’m slap-bang up against it, banging my head against it. Feeling like I’m screaming inside.

You think I’m joking. If you could see my face at these times you’d realize that I’m not. My face is a taut mask of anguished frustration. Each second that passes by grates slowly and painfully on my nerves. Time grates like a cheese-grater and I’m the cheese. I’m the cheese for sure, I’m the frigging Parmesan, that’s what I am.

When I think ahead to the coming day my stomach goes into a knot. I experience a pang of pure undiluted fear. How am I going to get through it? How am I going to get from A to B? Every day is full of time. Big blocks of it. Massive big blocks of it. Insurmountable blocks of it. There’s a part of me that quails at the thought of all that time. A big part of me.

I don’t know how I get through each day – I really don’t. I’m quailing inside, as I say. I’m quaking. More than just quailing and quaking, I’m running in the opposite direction. It’s as if that part of me has just given up, has thrown in the towel. It’s as if a big part of me doesn’t want to do it anymore. It’s on strike. It’s refusing to do it anymore. And yet it has to. There’s no choice – what else are you going to do?

I drag this core of refusal around with me wherever I go, like a lead weight. I face the day unwillingly, against my own will. On a fundamental level, I just don’t want to go through with it. I really don’t. It like when a horse balks at a jump, stopping dead in its tracks, forelegs splayed. No way Jose. That’s what I feel like.

Time – if I were to be frank about – is a living torture to me. I don’t know why I say ‘living torture’ – is there another kind? I don’t want to find out if there is. I sometimes feel as if I don’t belong in this world, I feel that there’s no place in it for me. It’s like there’s nowhere for me to go to feel accepted, nothing that I can do that feels right. I’m floating around looking for a niche, looking for an angle. And there isn’t any.

I just want to get each day over with as quickly as possible. I can understand why people like goals as much as they do. I might sound like I’m changing the subject but I’m not. It’s just an insight that has come to me. When you have got a goal then you can count down the time until you reach it, and there’s satisfaction in that. You’ve found a way of getting rid of time. A way of annihilating the enemy, and what could be better than that? Isn’t that what we all want? Or is it just me?

Of course when you reach the goal you then have to look around for another goal and start all over again. Eradicating time. Exterminating time. Counting off the weeks, counting off the days, counting of the hours, counting off the minutes. Then when you finish you pick a new goal and start over. New goal, new count-down. We do it again and again. Playing our games. Obsessed with our stupid  little games. Playing all the time. You never stop playing these meaningless little games. You never can stop playing.

I have another insight, an even less pleasant one. What I have come to understand is that the yearning to reach our goals is the yearning not to exist. The two are synonymous. The hunger to achieve goals is really the hunger not to be there. The more driven we are the less we want to be here – we’re itching for oblivion. We’re itching so bad. We’re oblivion addicts. We’re trying to get out the whole time.

But that’s only the half of it. The reason we’re drawn so hypnotically to goals, to non-existence, is because the hollowness of our goals is calling to the hollowness inside us. Like seeks like. Emptiness calls to emptiness. Isn’t that what they call ‘the twang of the void’? It’s the unreality in us that is always seeking oblivion, always seeking out itself. It’s afraid of the light, you see. It’s forever fleeing from the light…

That’s my insight anyway. Or maybe I’m just looking at things all wrong – I could be looking at things all wrong. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t really think so though. I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about…