Borrowing Time… prologue

It was not uncommon for me to listen well into the long hours of the sleepless night; because Tara had something to tell. She had a story from the deep, thick heart of the street; a tale about barely surviving that captivated me. She would remind me in those long evenings spent in thought; about how we all have this select amount of time to tell our stories before someone puts the lights out.

I used to think that maybe she was more neurotic than need be, that she is still running from the poverty of childhood and fear of displacement. It’s not difficult to be made paranoid by a society that lets a little girl slip through the cracks. It’s not hard to be scared in a world that buys and sells human commodities much like a flayed fish at market.

The more I heard and the more I walked with her in a life we rebuilt for ourselves, I learned I couldn’t be more wrong.

She is dead on right… We are borrowing time baby, and there is no way to repay the grace it has given us. My fingers pounce at the opportunity to get this all down at the end of the day; I’m fevered by the reality of life. I rest when my body forgets to do all other things. My sleep is now a pattern of images that draws sharp parallels between the snapshots of my waking life and the yearning of my subconscious. I watch all the characters that play major stage in my life somehow united and joining hands in lifting us out of this farce.

When I first saw Tara on that dirty wood bench in the pouring rain, eating a tuna sandwich out of tin foil; I would have never expected her sharp response to life. I saw gleaming eyes through wet fallen hair, and not her will to survive.

If only things were so evident when looking upon the fellow faces in our cities. Would I know that within Stuart Pica was such an unfailing desire to stand upon his own two feet that he would begin to overturn an ageless prejudice? Would I in lesser times see Tara in the rain and not value the sacrifices she made to survive? Would I fail to find these bitter truths in myself? Would I alone discover the facts that turn me against my dirty city and its treachery of whim if it weren’t for each of them?

Tara is as right as ever. We are living on borrowed time; and as she sometimes points out, borrowed space too. We try not to burden ourselves with the thought anymore, but the fact remains. Someday, someone is going to come with the bill; so there’s no better time to start running than now…