“Time and Space”

“Skylar walked to Fairer Elementary school with his brother. They only needed to go half a block down Mayfield to the stop sign, turn right, walk to Hampshire, the next street over, then cross it to the school. Space and time had for him, in those days, an elasticity related to his consciousness, a sort of relativism born of transcendence: the trek seemed to take an immeasurably long time and cover an inconceivable distance. He noticed the pebbles on the ground and bent to pocket the glittery ones. He heard the labored respiration sound of the fallen autumnal foliage, like big leaves of tobacco, as he shushed through it. He noticed the matchstick twigs born forward, onward by the current of the gutter-waters moving them inexorably toward disappearance down the dark-mouthed storm sewers. The direct relationship between chronology and spatiality had been, as he later became aware, inverted.  For his span of life was short but his experience of it, long. This inverse relationship has often been noted and explained away with the observation that a childhood experience represents a larger percentage of actual lived-time than an adult one. The real reason, though, is that childhood is suffused with Eternity, rendering its moments out-of-time, filling time’s interstices with great timeless expanses. Adults usually lose the Eternal awareness they had as children. Without this infinite buffer between and around moments, time seems to pass quickly and lead to death before one is ready to accept it.”