| I am feeling time rushing around me like wind, inexorably pulling me towards The Year Two Thousand. It had been scaring the hell out of me. Not because of the y2k doomsayers; this was something personal.
I was convinced - absolutely certain - that I was not going to live through the coming year.
It was an instinct thing. Not quite clairvoyance but more than "just a feeling". And it scared me. After all I've been through, to finally have it reasonably together, to finally have a place I call home, a wonderful lover, two cats that might as well be thought of as my children, and to be finally rid of my nasty habits of days gone by...and to yet know, deep inside, that something terrible was going to happen to me and the next year would be my last?
I gleaned this awful omen from an oddity of my mind: I have a timeline, which measures the years as they happen, and I have always visualised it when I remember the past. This timeline has two qualities which have disturbed me. For one thing, it runs from right to left with the past on the right side and the future on the left...as though I normally read that way, which I don't. The other thing is that it ends with the year 2000. Just drops off, like the edge of a cliff over nowhere.
For a long time I pondered this, and wondered about it. Both the right-to-left thing, which didn't bother me, and the ending-at-2000 thing, which...well, did.
And here it is September of 1999, with three and a half short months until Terminus...Endpoint. I had been trying desperately to ignore my gut feelings, with little success. And I feared talking about them with anyone, because I knew I'd surely be deemed a nutball, or just another millennial sensationalist.
But this week it popped into my head like a bursting balloon. Suddenly and completely without warning. And I laughed and laughed until I cried as I realised the source of my foreboding.
As a young child my parents had gifted me with one of those Big Books of Answers that are commonly given to children whose parents don't have time to answer all their childrens' little questions about the world around them. I read that book all the time. It was my constant companion.
There had been a section in it about the history of the world...and about the thoughts by the scientists of the age, which at that time was the late 1960's, about where the world was headed. It was also there to explain to children what a calendar was and how it was used.
This section had a time line in it - running from ancient ages up to the year 2000. And it ran around the double facing pages of the open book, starting from the upper left corner and going all around, ending at the lower left corner.
I remember now that the last years of it - the unseen future of the last three decades of the 20th century, were positioned at the bottom of the page...and so the years ran from right to left!
I had simply learned at a very young age that time didn't go on any further than the year that's sweeping upon us in a matter of months.
Where am I today? I'm very relieved that I'm not as clairvoyant as I thought I might be.
Demi Monde {monde@thraam.com} | 
