I awake in darkness. Total darkness. This is not the darkness of night when, thanks to stars and moon, your eyes slowly adjust and you start to see shapes. No, this is darkness so dark I simply cannot see anything.
I don’t know how long I wait in vain for any sliver of light, but around the time I resign myself to the darkness, a bright spotlight is switched on, and just like that I trade the blindness of dark for the blindness of light.
“Will the defendant state his name?”
Defendant? Defendant?! I state my name.
“The charge is murder. How do you plea?”
“Murder?! I didn’t murder anyone.”
“Count 1. On July 13, 1983, you went to a mall arcade, inserted a quarter in the Qbert machine, and were still playing an hour and 15 minutes later, when your then-wife and her daughter finished their shopping and came to retrieve you.”
“I remember! Not sure of the date …”
“Count 2. On June 28 of this year, you watched all eight episodes of “Harlan Coben’s ‘I Will Find You’” beginning at 7 p.m. and went to bed shortly before 3:30 a.m.”
“Yes. So —?”
“Count 3. Yesterday, you sat down to write ‘the Great American Novel’ but instead played Free Cell, Klondike and Pyramid Solitaire for nearly two hours.”
“What about it? I was killing time like anyone else.”
“So you wish to plead guilty?”
“What?! No! ‘Killing time’ is just an expression.”
“Let the record show the defendant has confessed to killing time.”
“It’s just an expression!!”
“In this case, it’s literal, my friend,” the interrogator says not unkindly. “You have arrived at your allotted time. Whatever you hoped to accomplish in this world, you needed to have done by now, for you are done.”
I am suddenly haunted by the words I’d read in a book years ago and even blogged about — the author visiting a friend who had less than a week to live. The friend said he was ready to go but sometimes wished he had 10 more years.
The book was How, Then, Shall We Live? by Wayne Muller.
“What would you do with those years?” Muller had asked his friend.
The dying man thought for a moment. “I would be more kind,” he said. “I would live my life with kindness.”
I stand in despair before the judge, the tribunal, or wherever I’m standing and before whom.
“I wish I had more time,” I whisper.
A hand touches my shoulder. In the blinding light I see a gruesome scar on the hand.
“It’s all right, friend,” says the most gentle voice I’ve ever heard. “I will serve your sentence.”
I wake up in a sweat. Was that all just a dream? It seemed so real.
I decide to take no chances.
I pick up another book and find the mission statement I’d hoped to find.
“Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against each other. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect harmony.” (Colossians 3:12-15, if you’re wondering.)
I see the scarred hand is still on my shoulder. No dream, then.
I thank the man who has agreed to serve my, erm, my time.
“I will do my best to use what’s left to me as if it is sacred, for I see now that it is,” I tell him.
“Works for me,” he says.
“Exactly,” says I.
