Now

For a moment he thought he would do it later, but he thought "If I don't act right now, the inspiration will leave me forever". So, Matt put down his vape, the first and hopefully last he ever buys, walked through his sliding glass door to get his laptop, and started writing. He sits beside his pool while the New Orleans lakefront wind converses with the hedges surrounding his backyard on Mardi Gras day. He is writing, but he does not actually remember what the inspiration he initially had even was.

Maybe it was nothing but a trick from the universe to get him to write. To write without a direction or destination, without even a trickle of conscious thought. "Let your fingers do the thinking he thought", as he types away furiously. He doesn't know what he is doing right now. He doesn't know anything. All he knows is that writing these words is better than doing nothing but distracting himself with whatever talking head grabs his attention through one of many possible glowing screens, filled with little red, green, and blue lights which use the anatomy of sight to trick him into thinking it's real. He quickly reads over what he's written so far and realizes he's been mixing up present and past tense. It's fine, though. He continues in the present tense. What other tense would you use in a piece called "Now"?

He writes now. He thinks now. Now is all there is or ever will be. Yet the future is there in a sense as well as the past. His mind is convinced they are real. After all, everything is constructed by the mind when it comes down to it, including whatever is around him right now. To the observing mind, the past, present, and future are all the same. They are all places in the timeline of the story the mind is creating. Yet, there must be another piece to it. There must be a part of him that truly sees the reality before him. A part that knows his exact coordinates in spacetime. A part that does not fall for illusions like seeing color or hearing sound. A part that is woven so tightly into the fabric of the universe that is impossible to see where Matt ends and where the cosmos begins. This tether to the core of being is the source of his power. He will continue to strengthen that connection because he realizes that as long as this tether remains strong, he cannot fail.