In Time

Some seventeen years have passed since the Chronos Affair and the destruction of the Goggles. Such incidents are recorded in the green diary, which remains hidden on every axis perhaps unto eternity. Julian Furthermoore is dead. So too is my beloved, if traitorous, Miranda. Mine is the stubborn and devoted heart of a lapdog and I knew I’d forgive her in time (it happened during a brief respite near her gravesite in 12 B.C., roughly seven hundred years pre facto). I returned from the conflict alone—my ward Toby Tick-Tock the clockwork boy having decided to remain with his new bride in Des Moines IV. If I’d had any Goggles to hang up, I’d have done so. As it was, the aeoninium supply throughout history had been depleted and I was left more or less marooned in my own time with no such apparatus. I could have settled anywhen, I suppose. Whether by nature or experience I remain an anachronism wherever I go. My own estate is as ill-fitting as the court of King Arthur. Either of them. But this is where I’d left my slippers.

I retired to my eggplants and never remarried.  

I thought of my comics often, of story lines unfinished. There was so much left unread, unseen, unsavored. All my heroes. I am ashamed to admit I thought of She Hulk when handling unripened tomatoes those afternoons. After all these years, lusting after green litigators! Hobbling through the park I’d often stop, foot traffic permitting, and look off into the clouds, turning crisp pages yet printed. Nothing tangible, but still quite real to me. “Thinking about the war, old man?”comes a lad. “Not the one you’re thinking of, child.” He has nothing to say to this, and so I sit him down and we talk about Annihilation. He returns the next day, eagerly anticipating further tales from the renaissance of Rocket Raccoon.

This new generation shows far more interest in such frivolity than did my compatriots in those dismal tearoom conventions. Such a sad affair. I do however regret disassociating myself from those gentlemen. In the time after those awkward discussions I believed, condescendingly, that these men of the time could not grasp comics for the masterworks they would come to be. That these fellows were ill-equipped to appreciate that which I appreciated, all due to their lack of foresightedness. I tell you, reader, that this is not the case. In these seventeen years of contemplation I have come to understand that the barrier was never time. We are the same, reader, in that we are different. Not just you and I, but all people from all points of axis. Not better or worse, but different in our sensibilities. We both love our comics (are maybe you don’t), but maybe you do not thrill to the harvesting of eggplants as I do. We are still compatriots. I extend a hand to accept yours in good fellowship, but even now I am fading.  

I have seen much. More than I was ever meant to. But I regret very little. I have loved what I love and hope that you might do the same. Unabashedly.

Unabashedly.  

And let that be enough.