Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times, #3)

by Mark Lawrence

I had left that boy behind in my wake, just as we all abandon the children we were. Slow or fast, the years pull us apart from them, sometimes in one savage yank, sometimes by degrees, like the hour hand of the clock, too stealthy for us to perceive its motion and yet when you look again it is no longer where you left it.

like many clever people, we were both on the autistic spectrum at the Asperger’s end.

Years crawl by but once they get behind you in a big old stack, it’s amazing how they seem to have done it in the blink of an eye.

Love had come into my world unexpected, unannounced, like a gentle breeze, hardly noticed at first, yet where it wandered it moved everything. Now there was no end to where I would let it carry me.

Always the child standing there wearing an old man’s clothes, an old skin hanging from old bones, and wondering where the days went, remembering how marvellous it had been to fritter away so many slow and sunny days. And wanting more.

How that sense of belonging had felt, of discovering that there were in the world people whose minds were like mine, open to something more than reality, ready to follow imagination wherever it went. I wanted that back. I wanted those days back. And even though I was standing in them, letting them flow by me hour after hour, I knew that could never happen. We get one shot. However you play it out. Fast forward it, rewind, it’s still the same: a single shot.

People often speculate as to what they might do with the last month, week, or day remaining to them, given that they are in good health and know what’s coming. The truth is that even though I’d had plenty of time to think about it, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. In an awful way, I just wanted it to hurry up and happen. There’s a certain pain associated with doing even things you love and knowing that it is for the last time.

Sometimes knowledge isn’t power. Sometimes it’s just a burden.

The universe doesn’t care about time. We care about time. Because we remember.

The stories of our lives don’t behave themselves; they don’t have clear beginnings, and even death isn’t a clear end. We just do what we can, we take what kindness and joy we find along the way, we ride the rapids as best we’re able.

Time and memory. Memory and time. The forking of timelines might seem to take away meaning from our own path, but surely it’s the ultimate comfort. We can look at ourselves and say that this isn’t everything we are. We know now that all of us are explored across an infinity of universes, and that’s the big kind of infinity, not one of those pokey countable infinities. We are all of us endless. Every possibility gets its chance. The best and the worst of us walk the stage. All of our choices sampled. Every mistake made and avoided.