THE STUFF OF MAGIC

Chapter 7 . Time

It's early. Great-Uncle Zhen sits at the bottom of the dune. As I walk towards him, the first ribbons of golden sunlight stretch across the horizon and spill into the water.

I sit down beside him and for a few beautiful moments, we watch the water and the sky in silence. Then Great-Uncle Zhen turns to me. "Watching the sunrise, how does it make you feel?" he asks. "Does it make you feel big or small?'

"Small."

He nods his head. "It lets us know there's something bigger and greater in this universe than us."

Neither of us says anything more as the sun creeps over the water.

"Aren't you going to ask me again?" I ask breaking the silence.

"Watching the sunrise, how does it make you feel?"

"No, not that. About drinking the elixir."

"You don't have to make a decision, LizBeth. Not now. You've got the rest of the summer to decide."

"I think I've decided. I don't want to be eighteen forever."

"Eighteen is a beautiful age. Young, idealistic, naïve, without the worries and responsibilities that ultimately come later on."

"Yeah, maybe. But forever?"

"Forever," he repeats. "Yes, forever is a long time. Imagine the longest day you've ever had, one super-long, endless day. One thousand years pass by, one million years pass, one billion, one trillion, one hundred trillion. Try to perceive that quantity of time... it's impossible."

"Maybe you would stop measuring time... years pass by, decades, hundreds of years... it would just be one long block of time. Well, not even a block because a block has a beginning and an ending. And there would be no ending."

"It's inconceivable to even imagine it."

"Yeah, it's a hard one to wrap your brain around."

"Time becomes nothing," Great-Uncle Zhen says as he stares out over the water. His voice is a monotone.

"For most people, time is everything."

"We think of time as something that's real, as something that's moving. But it's not time that's moving, LizBeth. It's we who are moving. We are constantly moving, changing, growing. And everything around us, everything in nature... plants, trees, insects, birds, animals, everything is moving, changing. So, what is time? It's only the act of counting. And who is doing the counting? It's us. We are doing the counting."

If we measure things by change, by our bodies changing, by the things around us changing, and if your body stays the same, what else is there?

"The stimulation of your mind, of learning and creating."

"Yeah, there's that. But what else?"

"There's emotion... your feelings of joy, delight, curiosity, fear, anger..."

"And boredom. You would eventually feel bored if you lived forever."

"What about love? Love is the greatest emotion of all."

I look out to where a big black and white bird grazes the water with its bill looking for fish then I watch it as it flies across the water towards the rising sun. "But those you love would always be dying," I say.

Great-Uncle Zhen lets out a long-drawn-out sigh. "Life," he says, "everything in this whole convoluted world, is constantly moving, changing, growing. That's the way it's supposed to be. Except for me... now..." His voice becomes shaky. "I'm left out of the entire beautiful cycle."