It's enough now; I'll stop.

When I was younger, once, I realised that life was like a car journey. As a child, you sit in the back, being driven. All of your decisions about the future are made for you. You just look out the window, enjoying the present as it passes, and strain to see the future through the windshield, though it is obscured by headrests and hair and shoulders. If you look out the back window, the past is clear and close behind you, comforting though unimportant.

When you get older, you sit in the passenger seat and the future swells up in front of you, spread out and all-encompassing, though sometimes you pull the mirror down and stare into your own face instead. Preoccupation lets the present slip by at speeds which far exceed the limit. Cameras flash.

Older still, and you're driving, determining your own direction. The future is in your hands. But you can't stop your eyes darting to the rear-view mirror to reflect on the past. The black cars with dark windows, looming menacingly. The roadkill that festers in the periphery. The countryside that flashes past and is gone, forever. Gone into the background.

I remember the day my Aunt died. My Uncle picked us kids up in the back of his jeep and took us to the house. I remember looking out the back, watching ferns and blackberry hedgerows zip round bends in the winding country lanes. I thought about the car being life and that when people died, they were dropped off and left behind. In my mind's eye I saw my Aunt left standing by the roadside, shrinking as we drove onwards, then disappearing into the distance. I understood we couldn't go back for her, but the thought made me feel sad to the very depths of my soul.

Now, I think of the path of life as being more like a long, long corridor, separated by doors of glass. When a door has been walked through, it shuts behind you, and there is no way to open it. Through the glass, you can see the past, laid out vividly in the memory like a splendid banquet. It feels so close, it stays with you. You are but feet away. You press yourself up against the glass like a child against a sweet-shop window, but you will never reach the time you once had, the time that has passed. Though you can't really smell the candy, or taste its sweetness, its colours are vivid and enticing and you know what you've lost, because you had it once before. It's never the same, really. You never remember it as it really was. You'll smear the glass with your fingers and mist it up with your yearning breaths, tainting memory with nostalgia.

Last night I took a hammer and I smashed the door down. The glass shattered around me and the blood roared in my ears. I was so close to it I could touch it, touch what once was mine. But when I reached out for it the glass had appeared again like some dreadful force-field. I could  do nothing but press myself up against its coldness and feel lost and lonely and separate. Past and present, simultaneously inseparable and isolate. Like ex-lovers, awkward and pyjama'd, trying not to touch, in a single bed.