Good and Evil

O, Time!

The teenager that everyone wants to be is not trendy.
They don't try to be cool, they don't try to fit in.
They've got overgrown curtain bangs that I always call fangs, or maybe those really fluffy bangs for guys that everyone's obsessed with.
They've also got Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat and everything, but not Facebook, because Facebook is for old people, even though they would never admit to believing that.
They use them often, but never, ever get sucked into being fooled by filters and feeling crappy about themselves and their bodies.
They believe in LGBTQ+, BLM, all bodies are beautiful, that sort of thing. You know, the whole enchalada.

But they still weigh themselves every day and stay away from dessert, even when a friend offers them a baby-sized Twizzler.
Notice that they never reveal---when loved ones die, they bury it and run away from it and shrug and scroll through TikTok, like maybe it will help.
It won't. It never does.
They wear trendy clothes and trendy styles, and they often do like them---it's not like they wear stuff they hate just to fit in.
But the only reason they like them is because society has pressured and influenced them into doing so.

Don't even get me started on society. Society is this cruel thing that worsens with each breath.
From its crooked mouth it spews flames of should and shouldn't and could and couldn't.
But society, if we view its menacing yellow eyes from a viewpoint of this nasty reality,
society is just a fragment of time.

Time gives and takes.
Time is the reason that your loved ones pass to a better place---or who knows, maybe it's a worse place---
every century, every decade, every year.
Time is the reason that you begin to heal and mend what's broken, finally breathing again.
Time is a friend and an enemy.
Good and evil.

There are two forces in the world, a wise woman once told me: love and fear.
Love drives the storybook good, fear being the birthing of the evil.
Time is good nor evil.
Time is both good and evil.
Time is a paradox.
Without it, simply nothing would change.

I watched Titanic with my sister, and I asked her why Jack didn't just jump onto the lifeboat on top of every one.
It sure wouldn't have been comfy, but he would have survived.
She told me, quite bluntly, that it was because he was morally a good person. Survivor's guilt and all that. Taking someone else's spot.

I would've jumped. I would've jumped to save my life.
This kind of thing has occured time after time after time.
Oh, time---I have something to tell you.
I don't think I'm morally a good person.
I'm evil.

You are not wholly good, said Time.
Neither are you or you or you.
Being not entirely good does not make you entirely evil.
You are like me, said Time.
You are good, and you are evil.
You have love, and you have fear.
And thereby you can change.

No one is good, nor evil.
My aunt was a teenager around the Harry Potter era, and she deliberately never bore a Snape Is Good or a Snape Is Evil pin from Barnes and noble.
She believed that Snape was both good and evil.
Although that might just have been because she didn't want to spoil the series for me.
Regardless, no one is purely one or the other.
Just like time!
Cruel time, lovely time.
O, time---

I just want to leave the the world a little better than when I came into it.

We all have love, and we all have fear. Neither is a choice.
The choice is which one we shall succumb to.