There is an infinite corridor between here and tomorrow.
Eight hours, perhaps.
A lifetime, perhaps.
Time behaves strangely when you stop looking at it as a clock and start looking at it as a place.
I am standing here tonight, at one end of it, wondering who will emerge from the other side.
Will it be me?
Probably.
But not exactly.
The person who closes his eyes tonight will leave something behind. Thoughts, fears, plans, unfinished sentences. He will leave the website open. He will leave the words where he found them. He will leave the little pieces of himself scattered across the desk like breadcrumbs through the dark.
Then the corridor will take him.
No telling what happens in there.
Dreams will rearrange the furniture.
Memory will open doors I didn’t know existed.
The unconscious will quietly conduct its strange little alchemy.
And somewhere, without my permission or participation, tomorrow will become today.
Then a door will open.
Someone will walk out.
Maybe he will remember everything I was trying to do tonight.
Maybe he’ll look at it all and see something completely different.
Maybe he’ll have solved something.
Maybe he’ll have forgotten the question.
Maybe he’ll be softer.
Maybe stranger.
Maybe exactly as I left him.
There is something magnificent about living this way.
We are not static things traveling through time.
We are travelers through an infinite corridor, meeting ourselves at every doorway.
Every morning, a stranger with our face comes walking toward us.
And we say:
Oh.
It’s you.
What happened in there?
Sometimes he knows.
Sometimes he doesn’t.
Either way, he is the one who has to carry the lantern now.
So tonight I will leave mine burning at the door.
I don’t need to know who emerges.
I only need to trust that someone will.
And perhaps, somewhere in that infinite corridor between now and morning, I will dream the good dream again.
What a place we live in.
Leave a Reply