Refuse to leave the present tense


I sit at my desk and remember how, years ago, I wonder what my life will be like when I am fifty, which I am now. I’m imagining that I’m living in a big house, I remember as I sit in my one-bedroom apartment. Now I pour myself a drink and cast my mind back to a time when I’m full of hope and passion which is never to be extinguished, as it is now.
‘What am I doing?’ I mutter to myself, taking a sip of my drink. In my memory, I’m seven years old, sitting in the highest branches of a tree which is being planted a hundred years before I am born. Now, though, the tree is long dead. I’m chopping it down at the age of twenty and thinking about when it is supporting my weight at the age of seven. I look at my watch.
‘Late,’ I mutter to myself. It is eight; the retrospective is just starting, half an hour ago.

15 comments:

  1. Ah, the old Dr Manhattan method.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Remembrance of Things Present:Stickley Way.

    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Guess you didn't like Slaughterhouse Five.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "as it has now been" surely "as it is now"??

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks, Anon – sometimes you spend so long trying to work out a terrible way of writing something, you end up overlooking the simplest things.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I've never liked present tense. It's more confusing than anything.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I am what I am. At least, I think I was.

    Great post. Loved it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thanks for leading me here. What a great blog! Another one to add to my favourites!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Rebekah, that's because it's really the non-past, not the present.

    ReplyDelete
  10. It's like the exact opposite of skipping blithely among tenses, but still just as badly well!

    ReplyDelete
  11. I am most impressed with your handling of the present - it's a gift.

    ReplyDelete
  12. This would make for a fabulous non-linear time traveler type character's speech pattern.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Sounds just like Faulkner to me. There's always that weird point where good writing and bad writing meet . . . .

    ReplyDelete
  14. I am reading this entry and thinking about how hilariously it is being written back in March. I think about what I am doing on that day: I don't remember. I have homework that I must complete, which I am supposed to be starting several hours ago.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Hehe.

    I like the elegance of the system of English tenses. Spent years understanding it and almost as many years teaching it. Really beautiful. And slightly confusing, yes.

    ReplyDelete