Time is a funny thing. Thousands of people have said that, and far better than me to be sure, but it’s true. Take the time span of five years: in many ways, five years ago feels so recent, so raw. Yet it also seems so distant that one can’t even be sure the memories are real anymore. In five years, a person can meet someone who quells all their fears about ever finding love; someone who makes them feel less like a monster.
Time marches on and those people have adventures and fall in love and make mistakes and get in fights and make each other laugh and cry and smile and sulk, sometimes all at once. After a couple of years, they begin to feel as if they never lived without each other; this person was made to find them, to fit them, to make them whole (despite neither of them knowing they were ever incomplete). They are partners, sharing in the journey that is this life.
But that wasn’t enough and we all know how it ends…with tears and a sour stomach, and a long, shaky phone call that ends everything. One necessary phone call that ends years.
And Time moves on, as it always does. They (whoever “they” are) say that Time will heal the heart, but we all know that’s horse shit. Time doesn’t heal, it just leaves scars. So Time goes on and the monster spends the next year and a half struggling to save its family from unexpected malfunctions of the body. Physical ailment and illness are tools of Time; a gift from a heartless god that challenges us to rise up, to face our fears, and test what we’re made of.
This monster knows well and good what it’s made of, and Time or God or fate or whatever you want to call it can go fuck itself. This monster can withstand injury, it can withstand hardship, it can even withstand looking into the face of Death…
…but heartache seems to linger despite Time moving further away from the original cause. After awhile, the monster moves on, wandering off from home in search of a peaceful place where there are fewer feelings to tear at its heart. Time brings new faces and new adventures and new pursuits, and for awhile, the monster finds some kind of happiness.
However, Time is a crafty bitch that enjoys stirring things up, so it decides to reawaken old memories in an unexpected place. And suddenly, after years of feeling blind, the monster is staring at its former partner, its former mate, its former everything, now living its new life. And that scar, that most tender, most protected scar, is ripped open. And for the first time in five years, the monster bleeds all the love and cruelty Time has gifted it.
Because as the monster looks at its former partner’s face it realizes that no one, no thing, has ever, ever, made it feel as complete, as this one person. The monster’s heart was this person’s to cherish and to break, to nourish and deplete, to receive as well as take. The monster bleeds because it realizes that no one it has since met has earned that right, or is worth that privilege, and that is a sad truth.
A monster’s heart is large and all-encompassing; it must be earned, and if you can meet that challenge, the heart will beat for you, even if just in part, long after you’re gone. If secured, you will be loved forever, no matter how badly you break it.
A monster’s heart exists outside of Time’s control, and it is that fact which makes five years ago seem so new, yet so far away. As if it was only last night that two people in love giggled like fools and smiled into each others eyes, toes dug deep into the sand, feeling like they were the only ones left on the planet. Two monsters finally found. And as if it was a millennium ago that they stared at each other for the last time, unclasped their arms and flew away, never to see one another again in the flesh.
But Time also has a way of showing us what we want and what we need, if we pay attention and listen closely. And the monster knows it needed to revisit these memories, to be reminded of what love felt like, despite its wanting to forget. Time will allow the bleeding to stop and a newer, stronger scar to form. Time will march on again, dragging the monster along with it, because no one, not even a monster, can fight the momentum of Time. It has plans for us all, though we aren’t privy to them nor do we often understand the “why” of its sometimes painful methods.
So the monster holds on to the fact that it was once loved, which means that it might be loved again. And maybe one day, while contentedly wandering through its quirky, impromptu life, another monster will stumble out of the brush onto its path. Messy and scarred and covered in its own memories, the monsters will recognize each other for what they both are, and they’ll smile. Their scars will suddenly feel smaller, and their hearts slightly stronger.
And Time will stand still for them, as they are owed this courtesy.
