I didn’t like myself. I didn’t like the person I had become. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t like the person I saw looking back out at me. I didn’t recognize myself. It wasn’t just the way that I looked – although it was that too – it was everything. I didn’t like anything about myself. I’d have to say that there was nothing there to like, if I was to be honest about it. There’s nothing about me to like.

The voice was roaring in my face, ‘Say a true thing!’ the voice roared. It didn’t give me a break. It didn’t give me a chance to think – it was just pure pressure. ‘Say a true thing!’ the voice insisted. I started to cry, I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t the faintest idea; I was all tied up in knots. I was crying like a baby. ‘But I don’t know what to say’ I sobbed, ‘I don’t know what the true thing is…’ Great shudders were moving through my body and I could hardly draw breath. ‘I don’t know what to say…’ I told the voice for the hundredth time. I was lying of course. I always lie…

Someone had put time on pause. Only they hadn’t – they had gotten rid of it entirely. Time had been taken away. The difference is that when time is paused then everything resumes again later on so it might as well never have been paused in the first place. It doesn’t mean anything. The pause is an illusion. You just resume what you were doing before just as if nothing had happened so really nothing has happened. A pause isn’t anything at all – it doesn’t exist. It’s a non-thing.

When time gets taken away completely then that’s different. That’s a real thing. All of a sudden you’re in free fall. Time has become something you can’t even imagine any more. It is something that someone had made up – something laughable, something silly. You can hardly remember it. Who could ever believe in anything as ridiculous as time? You couldn’t even invent it as a joke, it’s too pointless even to imagine. Why would you bother? And yet when we’re trapped in time then what a different story this is! Time is all we can know, then. Time is all we can know and yet what is it? This thing that we supposedly know isn’t anything. How can we know something that doesn’t exist, that isn’t real?

We know time so well that we’re bored with it. We’re always trying to skip ahead because there’s nothing where we are. We’re always stretching our necks to peer around the next corner, but there’s never anything there. There never will be. We’ll be stretching our necks forever. We’re bored with time but what we’re bored with doesn’t exist. Nothing that tedious and hollow could exist – nothing real could be so boring. Nature would never produce anything as sterile as time! Only we would produce it. Only we would invent it and then get trapped in believing in it.

Somebody had paused time and the world was suddenly in free fall. Everything had been shaken loose from its moorings, and was now drifting slowly into the great stream – the stream which came from nowhere and goes nowhere. It didn’t come from anywhere or go anywhere because there’s no time, because time is an illusion. There’s no up and no down anymore. There’s no back and no forwards. There’s no now and no then. Everything was coming apart before my eyes but really it was all coming back together…