If all your birthdays came at once

Last night I dreamed that all my birthdays came at once but it wasn’t good because I didn’t have the chance to live before I became old and died.

In fact, it was more of a nightmare.

And all the people I know in this world were there, distorted shapes on my peripheral vision, while I got old all at once. Doesn’t that take time usually, they said? I said, what is time? It was like a time pile-up, all these different parts of time lumped together in an unintellible time mass. A mess. I was in the middle, an old woman, feeling like a young women, thinking, does anyone actually ever feel like an "old woman"?

And what IS time?

And could everyone leave me alone while this happens?

I awoke to an knock on my door and in a panic I looked out of the window; it had snowed, the world looked like the sepia setting on my camera. For a moment I forgot what I was doing. Then I realised. No one had knocked on my door. My next door neighbour had just got home from a night shift. I was not old, there was no change at all.