for Quentin Compson III

TIME is was and was was then but now it's here and then it was gone. But then it doesn't even matter to anyone but ourselves, and still then it's a futile attempt to flee it, better left right where it was before we decided to meddle with it. And you never understood that. Pulling that weight on your back without even thinking about letting go, preserving your so called honor in eternity. But your honor wasn't honor, it was isolated security, belonging to no one, it was impossible conquest. Reducto absurdum, I think your father called it. I wish you had listened to him. Time was better left alone. No one not even you could touch it, wrap it up, look at it, put it in a box and simply understand. Suffering, I'm sure you thought. Endless suffering on a silver piece screaming its unrelenting tick in your ear and you, trying to conjure up a tragedy, like writing your life away and forgetting its just ink on paper. And goddammit if you weren't pretty convincing. For there was a time when I would lie on my back in the sun in the summer and think of august and that place I'd never been and think to myself that I knew how you felt and that I had found a friend. But you are not my friend. Because now I think I did know you then, know how you felt and what you were going to do and don't lie to me you knew you'd do it ever since you took a step outside of your house and felt that fiery sun beat down upon your back, burning without mercy without understanding without even feeling. Dice loaded against you, that's what your father said. You should have listened to him, like I did. I know then and now and yesterday and tomorrow and I know struggle and I know what comes after that, I know time and I am free from you, free to wander helplessly in all my jubilee and despair. and it's living. What you did, that was agony, agony and you loved it. That's what you could never say. Because every man eventually lays down and cant get back up, feels the weight upon his chest feels his bones slowly bending breaking cracking feels his heart struggling to beat against it all and every man takes a sick sense of satisfaction in his own condition however personal it may be it's a right of passage a pulse a reminder of who we are we are not above anything at all and it wasn't just you that's what you could never understand because it was never just you it never had been and it never will its every man its us all because to suffer is to walk and to walk is to

you killed yourself, you escaped time, you called it honorable but i know you i know what you were and i will never do what you did not even mentally. you killed yourself and called it honorable but i know you

-ds