Lately I’ve been thinking about time and its strange contradictions. Does it wear double-, triple-, quadruple-consciousness like we do? How five and a half months is like a stretched rubber band but is also as condensed as canned soup. Concentrated in heaviness, cloying in taste.
Our conversations dip into the pot and draw up time. The ladle asks: Where did the week go? Where did the month go? Where did the summer go? Is it already September? But we say that every year, don’t we? No, not in the way we’ve been saying it lately. Our asking is brined in emotion and carries the latent pain of whiplash.
I lost count of the boarded windows and out of business signs, neighborhood haunts for decades now gone for good. A mere fraction of people populate the sidewalks that on any given day used to pulse with life. Two-thirds of each face, including my own, is obscured by a mask. I stumbled upon a street whose sidewalk is peppered with a gentle spray-painted reminder every ten feet or so, that “It’s okay to be black.”
We can’t just add water and stir to make everything whole, to reconstitute memories that feel like dehydrated morsels of what used to be. “Just” assumes ease and does not encapsulate the weight or importance of what’s actually happen(ed)(ing).
It’s as if time went inward, stitching itself into our muscles and tissues, coating our every nerve ending. And in that vein, as carriers of time, the only way to go is forward. Find yourself tripping over your own feet to keep up with time’s acceleration? Me too. But we’re still moving. Time has shown its ugliness in our recent past. But there is consolation in even the simple fact that we are still present.
