The visions had been coming closer and closer.

That is, he thought, that time was smaller. But time was hard to hold onto. There were several of them. Interval! Yes, interval is a word, was, will be a word. The interval is the time between things. There were intervals between visions which were when the things he perceived were called present. He did not feel very present, though. There were other people but they rarely saw him; they avoided him. Something about his eyes shot through with green and his words shot through with future. People found him off-putting. So they put him off. He thought there was a time that they didn't, or at least some of them. A wife, maybe? He had seen that but was it future, or was it present? There was also past, but the intervals there did not get smaller. If anything, they got larger.

Intervals, getting smaller. Intervals in time but also in meaning. There were many visions. Many futures, or one future. Or many one-futures. The meaning of the visions foretold something that would happen, or that could be avoided. Or could it? The distance between them -- no, the interval -- was like a space you could slip through, but the intervals were smaller and smaller. The futures more and more oneish. Oneish? That is not a word, he thought. But maybe it could become one.

Memories! That is a word. That is when the visions grow farther apart. Memories are about things like family, ones who came and went. How odd, ones. One is one; how can there be ones? But there were not, at least not anymore. Some left, or faded away, some never were. Perhaps they had been visions also. Visions avoided, slipping into the intervals. Visions lost. Pasts that were not meant to be. Lost behind lines of crawling green.

Futures were full of terrors. Losses. Sacrifices. Was there victory? He knew that there was, he felt it, sometimes he could see its shape behind the horrors, dimly glimpsed. Green lines in the intervals. But it was always the pains that came closer, ever closer. Closer in meaning. Closer in time.

Time! Ha! What did that even mean. The visions were of events that must happen near one another in whatever time was, if it was anything. People in them had not changed as much as in the visions he'd had in a thing that was memory vision, a time when he had family, an interval of youth. When visions were rare, when they came with wine or song or meditation, when they did not leap unbidden into his eyes in lines of green. And the visions also were nearer to one another. That interval called present that tried to separate them, and sometimes succeeded, it was smaller and smaller. Visions closer together while they came closer together. It meant that they were converging.

Convergence. There was a past-vision. He stood in a place -- that was when there were still places, not only times and green lines and intervals. There were people -- that was when people looked at him as if he were ill, green lines in his eyes, and kept a distance, an interval but in place (because there were places still), but it was not a forever interval. But while they kept an interval, it was not so great yet; they still listened to him. He had a title then; he was important. He talked about convergence. He foresaw it. No, he foresaw foreseeing it. It was important. There was a memory of trying to tell people that convergence would be the omen of when a thing would happen, an important thing. A thing that was like victory written in crawling green lines, seen on a seed.

So was this convergence? In the kind of time where intervals were of present, and the visions came closer together, was the future starting to become present? If so, there were to be pains too great to bear. Losses. Death, fire, ruin, withering to dust, cold and storm. Things that were on the inside becoming on the outside, while their own inside became on the outside. He remembered that that was bad. There were tears. There was loneliness.

Or perhaps that was memory again. Memory of loss. Of the intervals that now stood between him and those that once listened to him, or touched him, or did not turn away. Could a memory be of the future? If you see the future more than the present, then what else might you remember in your past other than memories of the future. Or at least the past's future. He laughed. There was a time when such paradoxes were a game to play at, but that time was in an interval called memory, when there were places, and people in the places, and touches when the intervals between people in the places were taken away, and there was a feeling of being in the place where he mattered.

Love, he thought it used to be called. When he mattered.

What had happened to it? Eaten by green lines in the intervals?

No, love is not important now. Now is not important now. Convergence, that is what is important. The visions come together. Green lines, far, then near. There was a point, not a place, not a time, but an if, where they came, are coming, will come together. Everything became green when the lines converged. It was near. There were things to be done. There were futures to make. Losses to endure. Tears to harvest.

There was his end. For all his pasts and all his presents ended already and now all his futures did not extend past the convergence. Maybe someone would realize, as the green lines came together, that that day (when there were days) that he spoke of convergence, that he was telling the most important truth of a time when there was still time. Maybe before the end. Maybe not. None of the visions showed him anyone seeing him. Neither did they show his own end; it was only that the visions converged on a point, and there was nothing beyond that, no places, no times, no intervals, no memories, no convergence. No him. Thus, an end.

Or might there be something beyond it that remains unseen? Some other kind of interval?

No, there was only convergence, and the end. If time was still a thing, then it was time. It is time. The lines converged. The places are becoming one. The times become one. The one becomes one. It is, will be, his end. He marched towards it through the haze of green lines. It was time to converge.