"Life was never meant to be easy". Some people will tell you this, and then feel very clever and instructive for having said it. Maybe they're right, but if life is going to be hard, it could at least be straightforward. Bad things may happen, but once they have they should at least have the decency to shuffle off of centre stage and stop taking up space. Time, the same sort of people will tell you, heals all wounds. But time's a funny thing. It plays tricks on you. You think you've put yesterday behind you, and then you walk smack into it on your way to tomorrow.

Confusing the issue are what we like to call "milestones". The term refers to a marker used in old roads to indicate a point exactly one mile from the last such marker. The distance never varies, because otherwise you may as well call them whatever-the-fuck-stones and take your chances that you can walk from Adelaide to Melbourne in 72 minutes But people also use the term to refer to important moments in their lives, and when it comes to memory anything goes. It's coming up to a year since I moved into a house with one old friend and one soon-to-be-new friend, but I could swear it all started about a month ago. One of my housemates is expatriating his arse to the UK very soon, and we'll have to replace him. End of one yesterday, start of one tomorrow, and I can't help but feel there's an in-between period there that I may have missed out on. It's not (to be perfectly frank) anything I'm going to lose sleep over, but it makes me think of other matters where time and emotion have combined to shift the goal posts when my back was turned.

There was a girl who, as the saying runs, I used to know. Still do, in fact, but ... well, that milestone is a ways back down the road. And yet here's the thing. Sometimes when I lay in bed at night - a bed she's never seen - I'm surprised to find her there. She should be a couple of hundred kilometres and over a year away, but what do you know, she's that close that I can damn near hear her heartbeat. It's really unfair of me to keep her; she's got other places to be in the here-and-now. Lord knows that I don't want to hang around in the there-and-then anymore than she does - honest. I've tried a hundred times to put the past in its place. But time is a shameless cheat, and just shuffles all those old moments back into the pack when you're not looking, so you can always draw them out when, by rights, you should be expecting a brand new hand.

The solution, of course, is simple, as simple as faith: just believe in it. Invest in a good future the way you would a sure-fire stock tip. The problem is I did that once before, and look how that turned out. All that optimism and effort I sunk in is now locked up in what is now a way-back-when. I'd love to get my hands on that capital again, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Instead, I just keep collecting imaginary returns and grudgingly spending my time. It was said - by C.S. Lewis, in fact; I have a name to back me up this time and everything - that, "The Future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." But he never clarified how long it took to collect each of those minutes, or how long it takes to reach the present, which, presumably, you'd get to first. I think William Faulkner said it better: "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." What's my final point, before I end up quoting the entire literary establishment? Time plays fast and loose, but at least what you lose in hours you make up for in experiences. The conversion rate's not perfect, but then what is?