I’ve been thinking a lot about time, about what it does to the body, to memory, to emotion. How time holds us all with an elusive hand, one we try to hold with our own but can never seem to grasp. How we simultaneously want more of it but have such trouble being with all the time we have now.
How much time does it take to forget someone? For trauma to disperse from our bodies? For resentment to forget our tongues? How much time will it take for us to trust the love we’re given after years of heartbreak? How many times will we witness genocide before we decide1 to cease it?
They say that time is the great equalizer, except that it really isn’t because we’re not all working with the same quantity or quality of time—even though the clocks that tick above us measure moments with the same mechanisms. How irritating that is, that some people have more time than we do and such don’t need to cherish it as much.
These days I try to live without such an oppressive awareness of time but before, I used to tirelessly try to mark it. I did this with my journals, mostly. When I was younger, I became obsessed with capturing every moment I could, down to the sensation. I would keep little notebooks with me just in case something important happened so that I could have a quick place to jot down words exchanged, feelings experienced, the color of the sky, the exact time of day.2 Eventually I realized that trying to commentate the lapsing of time was impossible, not just because it was difficult to do (my hands kept cramping trying to write at the speed of my thoughts and perceptions) but it was incredibly time-consuming, and I mean that literally. Trying to document my life in that way completely swallowed up my focus to the extent that I wasn’t able to be fully with and in the time I was trying so hard to qualify.
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