Days Are Numbered

The clock never strikes. Not as much as it used to anyway. The clock is now in the right hand corner of the screen. Or on the phone. I have never owned a watch, he thought to himself. You can always find out the time if you really need to. It’s always there.

Today was his birthday. He had turned thirty-three. It was very difficult for him to understand. He knew how to count perfectly well and he was thirty-two yesterday, so being thirty-three should make perfect sense. It will soon. And then you will be thirty-four. There is no choice with this kind of thing. Aging. It happens to every living thing. The number is attached to you from the moment you come from the womb. A womb that also had a countdown. You live then you die and the numbers are put on your headstone, like a cricket score.

He tried to work out how old he actually was. Thirty-three today. How many days is that? He put it into the calculator on his laptop. 33*365=12045. That doesn’t include leap-years he thought. Do I add or subtract for that? How many leap-years in thirty-three years? He had reached his threshold already. Maybe that was a barometer of his intelligence, telling him something, telling him he needn’t go any further because he simply didn’t have the capability. One of the moments in your life when you actually understand that you have limits in your intelligence. They are hard to process, you think about it then you cover it up with vanity and try to forget.

What’s ten years anyway? There is no cycle with time. We live in the moment always. Whether we like it or not. It is easy to dismiss that phrase, live in the moment, as Hippie nonsense but the reason we probably dismiss it is because we can’t handle the fact that all there is, all there ever will be, is now. And we have no idea what now is. The past only happens in our memory, and memory is notoriously subjective. Everything we do, is a reaction to something that happened through the prism of our subjectivity. We don’t experience anything together. The moment has always passed. Just like this one. You can mark it off, the clock, the calendar, the anniversary. But nothing really comes back round. It was here and now its gone. Ten years that never happened in the first place. Just stop counting.

His face, his tired eyes, the strands of grey hair made him aware that there is something happening. You can call it the passing of time if you wish but he believed it to be another person. The young man who watched the towers fall, (The World Trade Centre was something he only had heard of. He didn’t know what it was. World Trade Centre and Islam were both things he had an abstract knowledge of until that day. He was aware that New York City had skyscrapers, and men in the Middle East weren’t Christian.) Anyway, the young man who watched the towers fall had disappeared. Faded away through hangovers and failed job interviews, monogamy and the constant disappointment of Newcastle United and now there was another man. A father worrying how he will ever be able to afford a house. Why are we bringing up a child in London? Kids stab each other in this city. Why am I doing this job at thirty-three? Its not a proper job. Why do I never have any money? I mean, no money. I walk around with no bank card, literally nothing. I can’t even afford a coffee in this café. This man would disappear too. Soon enough. The baby, the boy, the young man, the man. I don’t feel like a man yet. I have grown a beard punched other men in the face, scored a great goal in football, fucked a few women, got married and fathered a son. But these things don’t make a man. A man looks at me in the mirror. He looks just as confused as the younger man was.

More memories. I had never even really thought about Islam before that day. Then I was forced to. I wonder if I even knew there was such a thing as Islam. I don’t think I did. Then the only thing I felt for Islam was hate and fear. It was my introduction to it. How weird. I still don’t know what Islam is. What does a Muslim do? There was a guy at work who had converted to Islam. He never stopped talking about it. You know what they say about converts being the most zealous. Actually, I am interpreting reality through sketchy, unreliable memory and opinion. Me and him talked about how we both liked Paul Weller and Clarks Originals. He was a Muslim. He was a little bit odd but now I think about it I just think it was because he was a little bit odd. I don’t think the Muslim thing had anything to do with his oddness. I must have decided at the time that it was but it wasn’t. It was just him. People are weird. Who knows what that Muslim man was really like anyway? I would never have called anyone a Muslim man or woman ten years ago. They didn’t require a prefix. Now we all know what a Muslim is.

Jesus Christ and Alexander the Great both died when they were thirty-three, he had just found out by looking on the Internet. He decided then that this had something to do with him, even though it didn’t. He might as well treat himself though, it was his birthday after all. The only one counting here was him. The other two men had better things to do, when they were alive at least, it was left to others to keep the score, he assumed. At least they kept themselves busy. He then decided he had better keep counting and avoid dying this year.