Time Passages
I know everyone says that as you grow older, time moves faster. It seems to be one of the few things we can collectively agree on. I’m sure there is neurology about this - how a hike feels longer on the way in than on the way out to make sure you have enough energy and resources, because it’s new and there is so much more to take in. So as we move through life and our brains develop themselves around routines and we settle into the acceptance of what life is supposed to be every day it seems that really what happens is that we stop paying attention.
This was the first year I thought to myself “actually, I feel I watched that too recently” when contemplating the ritualistic endeavour of binging halloween movies. I had to look back and ask what did - or didn’t - happen in the last year that made time feel like it was collapsing on itself. Folding over. Truthfully this is the first year in my life where I really haven’t done a lot. I keep saying I was healing and taking time to recover from burn out and heart break and moving and every other hard thing. This was true in a way, but I think I was also zoning out. Looking back on my year feels like trying to read something written in water by candlelight - I can catch glimpses of it but I can’t see it all at once, distorted in some way by the light I throw on it in my own perception.
Recently I was in the hospital which is a strange place to be in time. My dreams were filled with historical moments - like I was a patient there in the 1900’s. Or in others like I had been there for months, my room looking more like a dorm with everything I had acquired to keep me occupied. Everyone in there lives by an invisible clock that tells time through meals and when they take your phone away. If it is 8:40 and breakfast hasn’t come, then when it does come we have actually time travelled backwards. If snack doesn’t come at 8PM then we are stuck in limbo.
While I was there I told my own time through other people. I was the afternoon if I had my one visitor come and hold my feet and bring me a coffee. It was soon to be bed if the guy with the black toenails was walking laps in the hall singing lady gaga. It was somewhere between 8 and 8:20 when a nurse would knock and break me out of the reverie of whatever dream I was still on the edge of and tell me it was time to take my blood pressure. New days were told in the form of a new doctor to explain myself to - it was a good day if we got along and it was a hard day if I was angry at them for misunderstanding me.
Night is the hardest to tell time. If it is my third time waking up then it is close to morning. If there is a light flashing through my little window to see if I’m okay then we still have a long way to go. My first dream was just priming me for the night ahead, my third dream was the final psychological puzzle to figure out before my heart rate was taken and my day was primed with “have you had any suicidal thoughts today?”. This was the true marker of a new day, which is funny because I would have had no thoughts at this point except “where am I?”.
Life is kind of like this too. In my apartment, in my normal life time is by how much light is in my apartment and when. I know it’s getting late when I can hear the neighbours kid crying. I know it’s past 11 when my anxious thoughts take ahold and it is always 4AM when I get up to pee. Usually time starts with the first coffee - in the week that is anywhere between 730-9 so sometimes I have lived outside of time while getting ready for class that is just a mirage until my mug is empty. It’s been 2-4 weeks that have passed by the time I fill up my gas tank again, and 1-2 weeks when I am washing my sheets. 5-7 days when I have washed my hair. 8 hours here and there by the time the taper candle has burned the way through. 6-8 days alone or 3-4 days together when I buy milk. 28 days when I start bleeding again.
What I am saying, in a way, is that often the clock and calendar mean less than we perhaps think they did. We remember and live our lives through tiny rituals. Time passages become little windows and hallways into the house of our life, the many different entrance points to presence. It cannot be measured wholly or equally - all of time is an estimation and we create ways to know where we are in time that don’t ask us to rely on a clock because sometimes a Monday is a Wednesday and sometimes a year has passed in 6 months, even when after a calendar year it really has only been 8 months, or 11 bleeds, or 45 cartons of milk instead of 80 even though it feels like we have spent so much time together.