It’s a strange feeling,
Knowing you’re living
On borrowed time.
To know that if you had been born in a different place,
Or a different era,
Your story would already be completed.
You would be another dusty volume
stuffed in a library shelf.
A small imperfect piece of fiction with an inconclusive ending.
It makes one wonder
What to do
With all that borrowed time.
How to fill the hours and minutes
To make the best use of those extra chapters.
And yet I sit staring at blank pages
Ink dried on my pen tip,
Poised to write
But with nothing to say.

I roam through settings
adrift, floating with no other purpose
Than to observe the scene before me.

I try on new characters.
Feel what they feel and hope what they hope.
I have no answers for myself,
but maybe I have answers enough for them.

I prowl through moments.
Stalking my plot.
Ready to pounce on any purpose,
Pinning it down until it calms and becomes
A cloak I can wear about my shoulders.
Shelter from the harshness of
Borrowed time.

The worst is when I loose patience.
Frantically running down corridors.
Endless hallways lined with boxes
Boxes packed with my life before this borrowed time.
Each box a chapter in a story waiting to be continued.
But I rush past them all.
The contents feel alien and quaint.
I don’t know how they might relate
To the story I’m trying to write.

Instead I search,
frantically flipping through blank pages
Looking for some meaning.

But it remains elusive and buried
In the sands of borrowed time.