A phrase from my youth just popped through my head. As a youth, the lyric line was just a nice phrase from a nice song at a nice time of life.
Now that I’m older, I wonder if we can actually put time in a bottle. What would that be like?
As if we could capture an activity, a feeling, an thought — then pack it, roll it and stuff it. Deep into the bottle. Cork the bottle with a self-sealing stopper. Then place the bottle in the sea of our lives.
One day the bottle arrives on the shore. Sometimes the arrival is prompted by the swirling of thoughts and smells and emotions and people that surround us. Other days, stooping at the shore, the bottle just arrives. Unannounced and unplanned.
We uncork the bottle and peer inside. A flood pours out. Perhaps tears, sometimes anger, often nostalgia. When we try to recork the bottle, we’re never sure the resealing happens.
Another year we see the bottle again — only this time, as we open the bottle, the emotional level is lessened. Or we fear to open the bottle — our previous experience with the bottle inclines us to let it float back out to sea.
I wonder, if we can actually put time in a bottle, what time would it be?