Day 64 - Scraps on the Floor

Scraps on the Floor

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 

Snip Snip Snip …

The sounds came and went. No one heard them. If they had, would they even know what it meant? The moment was there, and then gone. Like a forgotten memory.

A moment stolen. Past, present, future – it didn’t matter, it was all the same. Before, after, connected, discordant. It could come from a million different people and a million different places.  A tapestry.

Lovers in the rain who didn’t know each other. A family reunion of strangers. A war between allies.

There was no connection. No context. A new timeline without reason, cause or effect. The only relevance was the best of the best moments stung together in whatever way possible to make the powerful and vibrant new.

The Moment Thief, editing the precious, one second of space-time at a time. A little bit from here, a little bit from there; a dash and a sprinkle and the dust of time itself. Stolen bits of anything and everything. The spices of life. Claimed, taken away, tossed around, rebuilt and reused.

Who needs a past when the past was disappointment? Who needs a future if the present could be twice as bright? The boring parts were gone. Endless heart and soul and top ten emotional moments. Everything could be an extreme. Everything could be only the memorable. Passions were met. Whims indulged. Everyone was a winner.

Time could blur and blend like everything else and smooth over the rough edges. Who or what didn’t matter. The action required, the amalgamation of moments, was all it took. If could be anyone as long as their fraction of space-time could be spliced in with any other.

Michael was young and old and wasn’t there and was somewhere else all at the same time. He was Michael and Mitch and sometimes Adam and once in awhile Michelle.

Jeremy was a race car driver, stunt driver, getaway driver, in a car crash, avoiding a bicycler, running a red, stopping at a stop sign, speeding, slowing down, drifting and parked. There was no car.

Nancy waited by the phone, went out, stayed home, danced, traveled, die years earlier, had a promising career, had children, lived alone, spoke multiple languages, got lost in cities, never spoke to strangers.

Key moments. Over and over and over. An infinite number of moments. Detours and repeats and loops to be relived again and again. Things happened like a shuffled deck of cards that were then thrown all over the place. No order. No causality. No direction. Random moments mixed with other random moments and shuffled and reshuffled and draw and redrawn in any order.

Time was supposed to tell a story. Time was supposed to put things together in order, a neat little package, that made sense. The Moment Thief had no order, no story other than the ones he created. He was an editor, producing his own film to watch. The only things that mattered were the things he chose to matter.