The Passage of Time

 

   © Photos: Mónica Murillo. Text; Ángel M. Castillo de las Peñas

“Time is nothing more than a simple crystal that is scratched by the itinerant passage of the hands of a clock. It breaks, it tears with the sun and with the rain and with the wind.

And it leaves a rotten leaf litter that exudes a smell of rot and nostalgia, they are the memories of a palpable past.

The broken glass as a sign of war, an unhealed wound, a wrinkle furrowing the dead skin, a swing that only moves because of the wind.

The breath we leave makes a mark, the rust in the bowels of the earth, discarded objects that make way for another life, flowers sprout, rain oozes like a tear.

An ivy vine sprouting on the wall to cover the wound of oblivion and decay.

The passage of time leaves its mark on objects, making them unique. Memories of a life lived, a lonely tinkling shutter in an abandoned house from which a flock of ants and spider webs sprout.

All this is the price that is paid with oblivion, the panting passage of time that runs out. Grandma's cattail chair breaks, as she breaks with her forgetfulness, rocking in nothingness.

And out there life continues its course, sanctuaries are erected from which to contemplate the transience of life from which we travel to remote places attesting to its ancient existence, knowing that there was an event there, an anecdote bathed in the sun that now It disrupts everything from another perspective. And in each one we glimpse a certain mix of beauty, distress and danger.

And we continue looking through the same glass, now already shattered, and from there, observing everything, we realize that there is no immunity to the gallop of time, change, shed skin, and the scars of the soul of each object and of each being: a dead field that is born and reproduces and dies. And is born again.

And everything succumbs to old age: people, plants, buildings or an abandoned bathtub in the middle of nowhere.

And time will continue to be time, it is the only one that does not die. The glass will continue to be scratched by the hands of the clock, whether from sun, sand or a cuckoo singing that will also die. And someone will come to see those clocks in an induced coma, discolored by the passage of time and that will become, in the eyes of another, relics that exude the beauty of their own decomposition.

And so we will continue to observe the beauty of the decadent, mounted on the back of an invisible and rusty swing that one day was pushed by the wind.

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