Ready for more of my trademark longwinded thoughts? If so, read on.
Recently I've found it difficult to keep track of time. Not in the usual ways that many (close to all) of us feel now and again: when you get lost in a task or a hobby and the hours sneak past your notice, or when chatting and laughing and gossiping and gurgling with friends and suddenly it's 3am, or when you're on a drive with nothing but a crooning radio and a long stretch of empty road and before you know it the sun is hugging the horizon closer and closer into dusk. Nor has this difficulty resembled the other chrono-complicated ways that some (myself included) struggle to maintain a schedule, or arrive to a place on time, or manage tasks and responsibilities effectively and efficiently. Even these errors are in some way "normal," in that they are fairly common among any group of people, especially with stress. But the difficulty I'm talking about hasn't felt similar to any of these normal, human, everyday temporal slips.
It's instead felt more like a shift in my fundamental understanding of time, or maybe more accurately a significant break, a disruption, in how I sense it, how I make sense of it. Major life events that seem stunningly recent when they were actually long ago, or vice versa; the ages of loved ones frozen at an outdated number (and the birthdays likely missed therein); the sequence and duration of cultural happenings in our broader collective mixed and muddled puzzlingly—all miscalculated well beyond a standard margin of error, and increasingly to my confusion and disbelief of the actual truth. As if the Earth has been spinning all the while, and I, floating in midair just above the moving ground, have remained in place.
Not unrelatedly, I recently had a birthday—my second since graduating. What they don't tell you is how immediately and ubiquitously the word "old" takes on new function and form around that moment. Though definitionally wrong (and usually said in jest), what remains true is this narrative of "old" still pops up, is still said to me, and not from any one person or circle of people in my life. The (in)convenient pairing of those temporal blunders with the inevitable narrative of normal human aging has made for a not altogether untroubling mix of parsing out what is joke, what is truth, and what may be a classic case of dissociative trauma response. Who's to say?
And of course, this schism of temporal sense is situated—perhaps predictably so to you, dear reader—approximately around March of 2020. At first these errors of mine elicited within me no great stir, no real discomfort or unease; if anything, a hearty cackle and a "oops, you're so right, wow!" Now though, and more so with each instance, I worry. How might I touch the ground again, to become present in the truest sense, that the past and future might cease warping so wildly beyond my recognition?
You know?