TIME IS A WAVE

When I was younger I knew a lot more. Really. I did.
I knew what I wanted. I knew that I'd eventually find it. I knew I had a future. I knew I was ready for it. I knew my heart. I knew my mind. I knew there was a place for me in this world. And I'd know it when I found it.
Then time passed and my knowledge slowly evaporated. Until today, I know nothing. Or at least very little.
Oh, I know what I still want. I want to love and be loved. I no longer have to find it. I just have to figure out how to live without it and the woman who embodies it. I'm no longer certain there is a future for me. No am I ready for one if it does come along. I no longer know my own heart, since it resides in the woman who no longer seems to want it. As for a place in this world, increasingly there is none for me because time, it seems, has passed me by, like the breeze blows over the dandelion, leaving it shorn.
I used to think of time as a line, leading from here to there. It may not be a straight line, but it would lead from point to point to point, until, in time, it would take me where I was supposed to go.
Now I think of time as a tide. It rolls in, it rolls out. And only when it is at the right spot, when it has reached the farthest point, can you jump off and move onto another wave. Hesitate and you'll miss that chance and be stuck for a while, if not forever, on your present-day wave. Like it or not.
I had the chance to jump off and join the woman I love on a wave we would share. But she hesitated and so I hesitated and suddenly, stunningly, she was gone, carried away from me as her wave went one direction and mine in another. Never, I fear, to be carried to within our shared reach any time in the future.
Time, I once thought, was supposed to instill in us some wisdom, some knowledge that we would and could share with others. All time has taught me is that the longer I live, the less I really know. Instead, those waves of time seem to have eroded the knowledge I once had, leaving my mind and heart smoother and emptier than ever before.
And waiting, hoping, for her wave to return to this shore.