I am not confident

I am not confident about this execution, but my desire to give history back to its own curvature has grown exponentially, and has therefore superceded any need for silence. A friend once told me to keep the good things in my life close to me, and I used to toast my drinks to keeping what I know to myself. This though, this rag doll of what will be me someday, this is what I want as far from me as possible. So in my mind I have created a future and a past in which she will live. I didn't always know that every moment exists outside of time. Linear constructs used to be my religion, and the numeric rituals of math and history were my best subjects in school. That was before she came and set me straight with the - then mystical - suggestion that eternity didn't know graphs or lines; that when all things were considered, all anybody has is right here, right now. This was how I came to absorb the idea, in a visceral way, that forever was never a long time. Like her, forever had nothing to do with the endless ticking of minutes we all imagine. None of forever has anything at all to do with time. It simply is - unconcernedly, unobtrusively, and mostly unnoticed. And before you can think it or grasp it, it's gone. That's how I met her, when my naive uncertainty of forever collapsed. "You are not who you think you are," she informed me with that quirky arrangement of eyebrows we both possessed. I was struck by this, as much as I was surprised someone almost identical to me could be so separate. It was obvious who she was, but less obvious who she might think she was. She was my equal in height, with the same haunted brown eyes and turned down mouth. It was almost exactly like looking into a mirror, except that the mirror was tinted by age, wrinkled around the eyes, slightly stooped over, and gone slightly to fat. I asked the inevitable: "Are you who I will become?" Time had turned over in its sleep and folded its arms to touch its toes. Benignly she smiled. Seeing my own smile in third person was disarming. She nodded, accusing me of the wreck she was in front of me. There was a grief then, hers for me and mine for myself. I knew immediately, with that same grim certainty with which a thief eyes the gallows that I was doomed to follow the scarred footprints in her Salvation Army shoes. I would go with what I'd always imagined was my own design, but would end a ruin, a regret, a ghost. I would walk behind her in the eternal moment, making decisions I will believe are choices and end my forever being alone, misunderstood, and different.