Time is a story I tell myself. Sentences twine around seconds like tendrils of loveliness or despair or energy or lethargy. Minutes are paragraphs of weal or woe. My hours are scenes that I live out. Days: drabbles. Months: novellas. Years: novels.

But a life? What is a life, anymore? Three centuries and no sign of quitting, and a lifetime seems to have lost meaning. Perhaps someday my life will end, and I will have left behind a finite oeuvre. Perhaps I will simply decide that I have had enough and draw a line across the end of the page and, however many bookshelves of story are left behind shall be all that ever was.

Not yet, though. Not this year, I suspect not this decade, and I hope not even this century.

I have joys to counter all of my sorrows. My head is, yes, in clouds stormy or peaceful, but my feet remain firmly planted on the ground. My arms are full of the love of life. My home makes room for those I see as my family. Our lawns are for picnics and our beds are for dreams.

And so I sit in my office and write my stories. I sit on the couch and dream them up in my head. I cook with my beloved up-tree and watch em and The Child play in the grass while building my ballads after our picnics. I host my joys and languish in my sorrows, and I fall apart into distortion when I overflow. Cuckoo for Cocoa-Puffs, The Oneirotect calls me, and we laugh together.

That is now. That is when I wander the empty rooms of my house and drown in words with tears of ink upon my cheeks and the blood of helplessness still in my paws.

Time is a story I tell myself and this is nothing special. Time is a story \emph{we} tell \emph{ourselves.} Time is a story that Michelle who was Sasha told herself, and her ending was one of—I hope—joy. Time is a story that Qoheleth told himself and his ending was one of—would that it were not—agony. Time is a story that The Woman told herself and her ending was\ldots{}

Was it? Was hers an ending?

That is her own joy. That is her story. Her story is one of ambiguities and unanswered questions. Her ending is a question mark and a faint smile.
