Honolulu Weekly

Remember 2009? Long gone, now. The same is true for the first five days of 2010. They’re over. The moment you started reading this sentence? That’s never coming back either. Transience is the nature of existence, and like it or not, loss is inherent to the experience of living. And yet, we fight it. We say things like, “I can’t believe it’s already 2010.” We treat New Year’s Eve as though it’s the moment upon which past and future hinges, when future actually becomes past every two seconds. We can’t–we refuse to–believe the way time keeps passing. So we write things down. We photograph that which surrounds us. We lie about our age. We carve our initials, our likenesses, into stone. Mostly, we remember. Remembering is that last-ditch effort to stave off loss and obsolescence, trying as we might to prevent what’s already happened. The encyclopedia of what’s lost, of what we’re losing, is constantly being rewritten–moment to moment–and as we write this, we’re losing the minutes left before our deadline, losing space for more words in this very newspaper. So we offer just a tiny alphabet of loss, a glimpse at what’s already gone and what’s on its way out, from Anna Bannana’s to Zzzs.