(500) Days Of...

Dates are a wicked way to measure time.  Sometimes everything seems like it was so long ago, and you find out that it was fairly recent.  Time has merely slowed to a crawl for you, rendering life as something to "get through" instead of something to enjoy.  Other times it seems like it was only yesterday when we did something memorable, only to find out that it's been a month.  Time can also jolt by us like a lightning bolt, leaving nothing but scorched earth in its stead. 

500 days ago was June 20, 2011.  It was the first day of summer.  A Monday.  To be honest, I have no idea what I was doing.   But I was happy.  There were a lot of days that I remember being happy.  Those are incredible memories.  They were plentiful.  I could pick them off the trees like cherries in July.  They weren't tainted by fertilizer either - they were pure and tasty and lovely. 

There were also some nasty memories in the intervening 500 days.  Many of them recent.  They sadden me.  But I know that they are not the norm.  They really never were, because I had some of the happiest times ever during the same period - thinking about them right now brings me back.  How can that be no longer?

All this is to say that I wish my life were a non-linear story line put on camera and told with dramatic background music and full of goofy supporting characters.  I want to film it all and then watch it, reel to reel, like Leo during The Aviator.  A lot can happen in 500 days.  And a lot can happen in one day.  It's so interesting to think about the long-term ramifications of a seemingly inconsequential action on one day.  It's also crazy to have the same bizarre, unexplainable emotion for 500 days and more, unable to have it smashed by...anything.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt got it all figured out.  He raged against the dying of that light, moped appropriately, and, with some chance luck, figured things out.  He didn't want it.  It had to be taken from him.  And now here's normal old Ryan, movie-less, Joe-schmo teacher, unable to come close to explaining what has morphed into the most crucial thing he knows. 

500 days is, of course, an arbitrary cut off.  But think about what the next 500 days might bring.  And I'm the lead writer for each and every one of those days.  Aren't I?