In the first year, there was nothing. 

And then there was a year of darkness. Days passed like kidney stones. It was always winter. The air slashed across my cheeks whenever I went outside. The dry crust of salt caked my shoes and weighed me down. There was something deliciously miserable about it. 

The third was nothing. Life moves in duologies and trilogies and sagas and chronicles, and everything happens again, even nothing. 

In the fourth year, it came back. Summer was full of life that wasted away like rotten fruit. The bugs crept out and fed on the decay and brought new life. Every night I was on the couch next to a silent ghost, and the fireworks were loud enough to see. Even when I felt happy, it fizzled away like the red sparks in the night sky. Then the smoke, illuminated by newer ashes, drifted up into the heavens to silence some birds. 

Five was halfway, but halfway points are never truly halfway. One half is always longer than the other. 

It ended at six. Then it began right where it started. The year was like coming back to school after a long break, like I never left. I was in an alternate time, a fourth dimension where everything was different except me. Someone told me that wherever I go, there I am. No point in searching, then. 

Seven was unlucky. In the seventh year, I found a twenty-dollar bill in the parking lot of the gas station. Then I went inside and used the money for lottery tickets for the million dollar jackpot and didn’t win a single one. 

The eighth year was made up of only the important things. Faded sunlight. Old photos with young people. Blue pools. Green lawns. Yellow dogs. Red hair. I saw people I hadn’t seen in eight years, and they looked the same as their yearbook photos but  acted so differently. Never mind that—they looked different but I saw them the same, and they acted the same but I always remembered them differently.

Nine lasted forever. It was darkness. Someone told me the darkest hour is just before dawn. The sun couldn’t rise soon enough. In the meantime, life was dust. It crumbled away in my hands and if I breathed too hard it disappeared. I moved through the world as a phantom, and nobody saw me or felt my presence. It was as if I’d vanished into thin air, as if I was never there at all.

Ten years later. Ten years later. That’s what I keep telling myself: ten years later. Where do you see yourself in ten years? Things won’t be like that—things never end up like you think they’ll be. Sometimes they work out. Usually, it doesn’t seem like they will. Ten years later, I am the same person. The world around me is the same. Years grow like plants. Time boils like water. Someone tells me a watched pot never boils. So I put my face over the steam and stare and stare, hoping it won’t boil, trusting that the roiling bubbles will never form, but no matter how hard I stare—and maybe it happens in between blinks—the water bubbles and bursts and bellows and boils. Someone tells me that ten years later I’d be different. Ten years later, I won’t care about the problems I had ten years before. Ten years later, I tell myself. Ten years later. 

I go to bed and in the morning when I wake up the sun beams through my window and I can hear the birds hoot the same melody they did ten years ago, and my blankets are warm but the day is full of possibility, and I haven’t had that for breakfast in ten years and I can’t tell if it tastes the same, if the flowers smell the same, if the sunlight feels the same, if the birds sound the same, if the colors look the same. Someone tells me that there will always be good and there will always be gray.

Ben Spiegel