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Now

by Morton Marcus

Now is when everything happens, that word I left behind at the beginning of this sentence, and move further away from with each breath.

To get back to it is to become a historian, or a furniture mover in the half-lit warehouse of memory, tossing aside lamps, card tables and bookshelves in a futilè effort to discover the sound ticking beneath stacked sofas and cigarette-scarred armchairs with their insides unrolling like yesterday's clouds.

If I wrote now on the next page, it would squat there like a green frog with glittering gold eyes, waiting, and the moment I touched it with my pen-point, it would jump back to the previous page.

I would have to chant Now Now Now endlessly, if I wanted it to occur now, and I wouldn't have time or space to write or think or do anything else.

I breathe now. I fry an egg now. I put my shoes on now. I walk into the street.... Now you can see my difficulty: I am writing to you this instant; I am always writing to you this instant, writing about this place where I am and you are and how important, trivial, marvelous, terrible, futile, sad, or joyous this place is. But you never get to read my words until now, when it's already later and I'm somewhere else––in fact where I am now.

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