107. Excerpt from Anthony Stephens’ Mood Journal

March 24 2007,

Don’t know where the time went. Been so long since I wrote in here, I don’t even really remember why it used to help so much.

I was just lying in my bedroom right now and wishing I had something to organize my thoughts on and I remembered how good it always felt to write in here, set things down visually so I could look back over what I wrote.

See the larger picture, maybe that was the appeal. Sometimes it’s hard to figure it all out in your head.

So, it’s my last semester already. Graduating in two months, med school in fall. Things have changed so much. It seems like it all happened so fast.

I’m just getting used to living here and now I might be leaving soon and, really, where the hell did the time go?

I talked to Dr. Silver a few weeks ago and it was so weird, hearing his voice and remembering our sessions and…I just had to thank him for everything, for all his help. He sounded pleased, genuinely pleased, and overall exactly the same. Like I could still imagine him sitting in that chair and me sitting on “The Couch,” both of us going back and forth. Which makes it seem like it was just yesterday I was there, even though it’s been a year and a half.

Funny how time works. In one sense, a couple of years seem like a lifetime. In another context though, it’s like a drop in a bucket.

I mean, I just flip-flopped on my feelings like three times in as many sentences. Back to that bipolar psychobabble bullshit. I’ve been taking way too many cognitive theory courses.

What I’m trying to say is that one minute it seems like it was twenty years ago that I moved here and got all suicidal again—things have changed so much that I can’t remember what it was like to be that far gone. And yet, at the same time, when I think about it—really think about it—it feels like it was just last week I was lying on my shrink’s couch listening to him tell me why I’m so fucked up.

Basically, all of this has made me realize what the most unstable element in the universe is: time.

It’s the reason we’re all fucked up in the head. We try to slow down, take things in, figure out what just happened, what is happening, what’s going to happen, try so hard to make sense of it all. And while we’re doing all of that, time just keeps moving forward, shifting and changing and not really giving a shit about us or our analyses, knowing we have no choice but to stick around. Unless we’re willing to do something drastic.

In a way, time’s kind of like…a high maintenance chick or something. A really hot high maintenance chick, sitting at a bar with a couple of her other hot friends, if you can picture that.

They’re all sitting around laughing and you know they know that everybody’s looking at them. And they’re all there, Destiny, Trust, Faith, Love and, of course, Time, who’s sitting at the head of the table just basking in everybody’s attention.

On the surface, Time, she looks confident as shit, beautiful and secure and like nobody can fuck with her. But then you get close to her and get to know her and start realizing her entire demeanor can flip on you from one minute to the next.

Time’s a tricky bitch, that’s for real. The worst type of acid trip if you let her in your head. Spend the rest of your life not knowing what the fuck is real or not.

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