I have seen the past, and now I am old. It is only upon the realization that time has passed that we age. Were we to remain oblivious, we would be children forever, free to bang our drums and climb trees and frolic away from the cares of life.

Time is a river, and we float upon it like garbage, rushing downstream to be dumped into the vast ocean. It is only by the remembrances of the fishermen lining the banks that we can leave a mark of our passing.

To the fish in the river of time, the rafts of junk that make up our lives are great places to hunt. All sorts of tasty bugs lurked trapped in the crevices of our lives—little mad, twitching things that we refuse to show to others and hide underneath our air bubbles, hating them but afraid to drown them. When the fish catch them, we convince ourselves that we never liked them at all, despite their being the only things that truly matter.

Somewhere, far out at sea, a giant raft is forming from all the millions of lives that flow downstream into it. One day, this raft will achieve sentience and claw its way upriver like the great, blind beast it is, devouring the fishermen that have in turn eaten that fish that once consumed our dark secrets, closing the cycle and unmaking all things as it stumbles back into the source of eternity. On this day there shall be only Joy and Pain and Oblivion.