Passing Ships

…..and throughout this and that and everything else besides, time kept moving along slowly, ineluctably, inexorably…..and even though a mortal person could not empirically detect that movement with the five traditional senses, one could sense instinctually that life was moving along with an irresistible momentum all its own and that one was trapped aboard an incomprehensibly large ship from which there was no complicity and no escape.  We were all in it together, yet incongruently we were all in it alone as well. We had no hand on the rudder with which to influence the direction we were going; we just stood by and watched dumbly as things slipped by in the pitch blackness, amorphous things that we thought we might like to sample but were never afforded the opportunity…..