too long a time

This is how I've been feeling for too, too long...I found this in the "First Person" series on page 67 of the February 2000 print version of Life magazine; John Trotter is the author. Yes, that long-past Friday afternoon did become a watershed, but rather than celebrate it as I wanted to do then I now have too much to grieve.

I struggle each day to find that once familiar person, me, closest companion. I've lost so much precious time. It's been rolling over me like a river in a nightmare, having neither length nor brevity. The waters...tangled me in a dark eddy of lonely struggle, apart from the world, where time hardly seemed to exist at all, even as it flowed past me. But as my awareness has gradually risen...I see that my loved ones, my friends, the rest of the world, have gone a long way down that river without me.