Yours Truly, Me: Outtakes (Troyler)

✉️Letter #3✉️

Dear Tyler,

This is only the third letter I've written you, and I can already say that this is definitely going to be an unusual one. See, the other letters I've written to you have been venting, or ranting, or other forms of communication in that nature, but this one is more just thinking about time.

I started thinking about time after a quote I read today, somewhere on Tumblr. I'm not sure what book it's from, but the quote said this:

"Not then, but afterward, I started to think about time, and how it keeps moving and draining and flowing forever forward, seconds into minutes into days into years, all of it leading to the same place, a current running forever in one direction. And we're all going and swimming as fast as we can, helping it along.

My point is: maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, or so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it.

But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know."

Okay, maybe that wasn't so much a quote as much as an excerpt, but you really need to read the whole thing to feel the full effect. I wish I could find where this is from - it sounds like a novel, but I can't tell which one - so I could read it, and maybe recommend it to you. If you know how to find out, cool. I'd say let me know, but, well, you know.

I'd say the quote is pretty self-explanatory, but it still really makes you think, forces you to connect the dots, and leaves you both more confused and more relieved of confusion than before ever reading it, if that makes sense. Probably not, though, so I'll explain why that is anyways: You're more confused because now you have a whole other thing to think about and ponder in your life, and depending on who you are, you might have more or less connections to make. It leaves you less confused, because while it brought a new question on the table, it still answers it fairly well in a way that you understand.

I don't know why I explained that to you. I guess it's because if I was talking to someone I knew personally, they'd either have no idea what I'm talking about and ask me to explain it in simpler terms, dismiss it completely, letting my thoughts go right over their head, or we wouldn't be on this conversation at all because they don't like to think about things too deeply. It's like those annoying questions in text books, that start ( in Maths, for example ) like,"What is the answer to this equation? Explain."

I always hated those. Why should I have to explain a straight answer if it's the correct one? I obviously understand. And you could argue that there's the chance I cheated, but really, how high is the probability of a person cheating off of someone, especially with how far they space desks these days. I'd have to lean my head over to see someone's paper, and probably sit up, too, I order to actually read what someone is writing. You'd definitely see that. You could also argue that I could stay the answers, but really, there's a reason that that's often considered news: it's because it rarely happens.

Okay, this letter went way off topic again. We were talking about time - did you remember that, because apparently I didn't - and how it's weird and complex and interesting and intriguing and confusing and a myriad of other long words. Anyways, I just never real,y thought about the concept of time as never ending like that, believe it or not. I guess it's kind of like when you read a book, or series, and when it's over, the story may technically be over, but you know that no matter what happened, there's still something happening after the end. If the book ends happily, with a couple getting together, you know that that's obviously not the end. They could've gotten married, and had children, and grandchildren, or they could've broken up and discovered that they had an entirely different sexuality. You never really know.

My point it, a story ends depending on who tells it. An author, obviously, is telling the story of a fictional character. When the author finishes writing the story, they're done, but the characters still go on living their fictional lives ( unless they died ), having more and more fictional days, continuing on forever and ever and never really ending, because time goes on after the story ends.

That's how it works with life, too. Even after I die, there will still be time. My story may be over, but there's still billions of stories to be told from there. I can die, but no matter what happens after death, whether I go to Heaven or Hell or neither or stay here or simply cease to exist, there's still time. There's the time before I lived, the time I'm alive, and there will be a time after. That's how it works for everyone.

And then you have to wonder when that time that you no longer exist will come. Will it be soon? Will it be far away? Will it be right in the middle of writing this? I could have a heart attack right now, with no one home and no way to get help, and be dead in minutes, and then it'd be over; the time that I existed would be over.

Another weird thing to think about is the fact that there wasn't a long period of time that you were alive, and there was an enormous amount of time before you weren't alive - try to before the existence of anything - but when you're dead and gone, there's going to be literally forever that you no longer exist. You're never going to come back - unless reincarnation exists - time will last on into eternity, you'll be forgotten, gone into oblivion, and once that point is reached, you have to wonder; what is the point of being alive, only to be another forgotten remnant of time? Another victim to the dim memories of humanity.

As you can probably tell by the morbid note this letter ended up taking, there's a pretty clear reason that I don't talk to anyone I actually know about this. Hell, I try not to think about this too much, I do. It's a pretty dark, twisted path my mind takes on occasion, but that's why I'm writing to you. I thing getting my thoughts in order and forming them into something that makes a certain amount of sense could en therapeutic for me, or at least make things less confusing and overwhelming for me.

As usual, I don't know if you've read this or not, or if I'd rather you read this or not, but either way, thanks.

Yours Truly,

Me

Btw the book the quote is from if Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver. Just go read it. Also, idk if anyone got the notification for Internet Infatuation, but I've updated twice in the last two days, so if you read the story and haven't known about the updates, go check it out!

∞Hope