Passed

Have you ever been haunted by the feeling that your time has run?

You suddenly look around and realize that the options you always thought were there - dreamed were there - are no longer there? That you have apparently been conducting a dialogue of the deaf with yourself (otherwise known as a monologue)about the future and its possibilities?

Walls that have been carefully and silently constructed over time - some by yourself, some by the simple passage of time itself - reveal themselves to you the moment you smack into them with a running start. The garden paths that once were there leading invitingly into the larger world seem mysteriously overgrown with thorns, leaving the one you are on the only seeming choice to move forward.

In some cases they may still be options - but only buried beneath the weight of leaves and vines, needing to be cut out brutally to move forward. In other cases, the overgrowth is such that you can never follow that path again. It is, simply, gone.

And you suddenly feel inside that perhaps things really have moved on; that life and possibilities, like canned goods, are sometimes put back when the recipe changes - or the expiration date has passed.