I Don't Want to Write About Hamlet so Have Some Reflective Poetry that Hopefully Counts for This *Finger Guns*

If you asked someone what proof there is of the existence of time, they’d say “well, people age and the sun sets and the tide comes in and plants grow,” and so and so forth. They’d keep giving you these examples of patterns. Patterns of life and of death and ultimately, patterns of change. We speak of these phenomena as though driven by an invisible, external force, a force which propels all matter through the universe in a forward motion. We speak of time as if it is an ever-lengthening ruler, with which the entire universe measures itself, keeps its rhythm. See, what I’m getting at is that maybe there is no external force, maybe there is no such thing as “time”. And I don’t just mean that “time” is obviously a concept created by humans to map out the simultaneous linear progression of everything that happens; I mean that perhaps there is no simultaneous linear progression of things at all. Perhaps every plant that grows, every tide that inches up on every shore, every sunrise, every creature that is born, ages, and dies; perhaps none of these predictable patterns of change take place due to any unseen forces, perhaps they no are more than just that: predictable patterns of change. It makes sense that because so many components of our world seem to shift in the same manner that we would automatically assume that there is a single rule, a single law of physics governing these shifts and these patterns. We know that what goes up must come down and that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and that matter is something that has mass and volume, we accept these as cornerstones of the entire cosmos. But time is a rule that I find harder to accept; it appears so much more like a creation, like a simple answer, like an easy way out of a hard question. We know what cancer is, and we know what causes it, but we don’t know why people get cancer. As in, why does that woman cancer but not the one next to her on the bus? We knows that things change and we know what about them changes and we can make a linear map of these changes, but do we really know why they change? Or have we simply assumed that because they do, there must be a reason? We know that 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15 all go one after another, but only because we are counting by three’s. There is no indestructible crimson thread that turns 3 into 6 and 6 into 9 and so and so forth until the number grows old and weak and dies. There is no crimson thread at all; there is nothing pulling us, or anything, through the universe. Space is a vacuum, we are the dust, and just now have we begun to watch the particles settle and wonder “why?"