It’s been cold these past few days. It just seems to get colder and colder, even when the sun is shining brilliant bright daggers onto the frozen planet. I sometimes wonder how cold it can get before everything that man has built cracks and falls to pieces. The Earth is tired of us now and wants us out of her hair. She has the power to kill us, but she’s infinitely merciful. Still, it’s about time we traveled to another planet and ruined that one for a while. Don’t you agree?

I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. Last night I turned on the TV and listened to Letterman as I watched the clock tick. It was so hard to look away. You see, the clock on my wall is five minutes slow while the clock on my cable box is the correct time, so I kept watching to see if it would catch up. It didn’t, of course. I would have to get up, take it off the wall, and wind the damn thing to get it to match. The real reason I watched it was because it was a two-dollar clock made of plastic, and it is probably the most important invention in the history of mankind. We live our lives around the clock; we travel the circumference as if each of us were a single, plastic hand accented by glow-in-the-dark paint. Sometimes we jerk and sometimes we glide, but we continue in a circle until the battery dies. We subsist based on the location of the sun and the moon, and society’s agreement on what hour, minute, and second it is. Without the clock—without time—we’d have no way to organize our very existence and the human mind would become lost in the endlessness of the universe.

So excuse me if I thought the damn thing should be able to adjust itself by five minutes.

I’ve been thinking about time a lot, I guess. I’ve read up on the time-space continuum and how we’re always moving forward through time, which is the fourth dimension, and how we can’t change that even if we can move freely in the third dimension, space. Did you know some scientists theorize that at the event horizon of a black hole your relationship to the dimensions kind of switches, so you can move freely through time but you’re constantly moving forward through space? That makes me think about my childhood—how I was always running around with youth’s energy and how time seemed to move so much slower back then. Do you remember when we ran away from home together? Do you remember that little shelter we built in the woods down the street from your house?

I think we could still see your house from where we were. I really believed we would live out there, and I began planning my whole future as a wanderer with no home and no one to answer to. Instantly, I felt like I had been there for years, though the sun hadn’t even set on the day. But just as I began to feel the power of freedom, you got tired and started to cry. Remember how angry I got? I screamed at you and you ran home like the child you were because I had become an adult before your eyes. As soon as you disappeared I realized that I would always be better off without anyone else. I’d never liked being with others. And when you came back with your parents and found me foraging for berries, my hair filled with twigs, I still knew that my future would be the same, that I’d be okay being alone.

I am okay being alone.

I bet you didn’t know how much that little venture into the woods affected me. I’m sure that if you thought about it at all, you thought about it with the same warmth and humor that we feel when recalling any other childhood idiocy we experienced. But when I think about it, I see it with the cold understanding with which one remembers getting into a car accident or being arrested. It’s unpleasant, but it’s ultimately something that shapes your whole view on the world and how you live.

Because of the woods I became an adult, but I also never grew up. I can’t live like other adults, with a nine-to-five job at an office that advertises sanitary napkins to pre-teens, and a wife and a hyperactive child and a neutered shih tzu in a house that belongs to the bank. Because of the woods, I tasted what it was like to live for life and not for some artificial goals that society has given me so I can be like everyone else. I’ve tried so goddamn hard to get back to that feeling, to change to what people tell me to be, but I can’t figure out how to survive the first way and how to not want to kill myself the other.

I had a job interview today to be a janitor at a mall. It didn’t go well, but then again I’ve never done well under pressure. It was worse than usual. I kind of stopped listening to what he asked me. I watched his lips move and his tongue flick up and down inside his mouth. I’d never really watched a person speak before because I’m usually busy listening. Sometimes, when people really want to listen, they look away from the person talking or close their eyes. I wonder if it’s because they’re afraid they’ll become entranced by the amazing dance of lip and tongue that is performed just for them, like on a stage, begging them to watch at the risk of losing the incidental sound produced in the background. This guy was especially talented. He annunciated so well that every word twirled and spun on his face, pulling a cheek down one instant and making his jaw twitch the next. My God, if only I could have told him how beautiful it was.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on with me. How are you?

Love, D