As Chris and I were leaving his parents’ house on Sunday, they complimented my new jacket — a slightly oversized black leather blazer that my grandma gave to me after realizing she didn’t wear it nearly as much as she anticipated. Suddenly, brown leather jackets emerged from where they’d been safely stored in my in-laws’ basement, one from the early ‘90s and one from much earlier. While Chris tried on the oldest jacket, which had once belonged to his grandfather, my father-in-law put on the jacket from the ‘90s, explaining that it had been a gift from my mother-in-law early in their marriage. For Christmas that year, they had both ended up getting each other leather jackets in the same shade of medium brown that went on to dominate the decade. 1990 didn’t seem like it could be that long ago until my mother-in-law laughed that while they were gifting each other leather jackets, my mother was busy playing flute in her high school marching band, and neither Chris nor I would exist for several more years.
In an antique shop in a small town in Illinois, a friend of mine found a novel published in 1911 and took it home with her. When she sat down to read it earlier this week, she cracked it open and was met with the faint musk of decaying paper and a signature in pencil: Annie McFadden, Dec 25, 1915. Annie had no way of knowing that my friend would crack open her Christmas present more than a century later to try and enjoy the book as she once had; she simply wrote the date as it was, as she’d no doubt done countless times before, without a second thought.
Every time I see a date written in someone else’s handwriting, I can’t help but think about how the person writing it didn’t realize they were living in the past. They simply wrote the date, commemorating one blip in the constant stream of dates that would make up their lifespan, and time continued to hurdle on without their taking much notice. They wrote the date as I do nearly every day without a second thought; we all are living in the past of a distant future that will come whether or not we are ready for it.
Annie’s day-to-day life, a world which now seems hardly more real than Hogwarts to me, was no less banal and no more idyllic to her than this life is to me. She didn’t wake up and put on her petticoat as if playing pretend, or wonder if her new book would outlive her. She didn’t marvel at how primitive her family’s outhouse was, or contemplate how long ago her life would seem to some girl in the future, clacking away at a device that hadn’t been invented yet. 1915 was just as real to her as 2015 was to me. Slowly, the world has crept away from 1915, and even 2015, to deposit us here — a destination whose meaning shifts slightly with each passing moment.
The future comes just a little at a time. It flies at us in bite-sized pieces and takes barely a moment to make its presence known before it transforms, before our eyes, into the past. Like a river, time flows constantly past us; fresh gallons of water circle our ankles every second as we wade deeper, just as new moments constantly flood our consciousness, measurable by increasingly smaller increments.
Chloé Williams, a writer whose work I very much enjoy, has iterated variations on the theme ‘all we have is time’ in her work multiple times, including a piece she wrote for Cloudi in November, as well as the April edition of her newsletter, where she mused how, in the moments before her birth, “all [her parents] had was time.” I find myself repeating the phrase to myself in moments of exasperation at the amount of time that’s passed me by compared to the amount of time I have remaining to do the things I want to do — an amount that could span decades if I wasn’t so delusionally intent on cramming an entire lifetime’s worth of accomplishments into my first 30 years. All I have is time.
The hardest thing to comprehend about time is the varying speed at which it moves. As I inch toward my future, time seems to stand still; each day does little to bring me closer to where I want to be. I’ll be moving in less than a month, and yet it is almost as difficult for me to imagine my life in my new home as it is for me to imagine a new life on Mars. Similarly, I can hardly believe that just over a year ago, I was living in a completely different state, looking out an entirely different set of windows and longing to be where I am now. Remembering the various ways my life has looked over the years feels like piecing together clips of a movie I halfheartedly watched once because someone else in the room turned it on. The only version of myself that makes sense to me is the self that exists in this very moment — the bridge between who I was and who I’ll be.
As all children inevitably learn from an elder trying to get out of doing something they promised they would do the following day, tomorrow never truly comes — instead, our life is composed of a string of todays. In the same way, as long as I’m alive, I’ll never cross the bridge between who I was and who I’ve yet to become. I always thought I’d eventually reach the distant island in front of me, firmly plant my feet on who I thought I’d be, and gaze back over the bridge at who I had been. But the truth is that I’ll always be becoming. Life exists on the bridge, suspended, for a moment, between past and future.
The point of meditation, I now realize, is to bring more attention and appreciation to the bridge. Instead of staring longingly at where we were or where we might be headed, we focus on the bridge, so that as moments whiz by our heads, flying from the mass of land ahead of us to the mass of land behind us, we might be ready for them. Time is the most fleeting of all the fleeting things, and yet somehow the only thing that never truly leaves us throughout our entire life. All we have is time.
It is a bit hard for me to see the island in front of me now. There’s a thick layer of fog between my spot on the bridge and the place where it connects to the earth ahead, making it hard to see where I’m going and how I might get there. Unable to navigate as expertly as I’d like, I’m tempted to slow down or even stop and wait for the fog to clear. Caught somewhere between racing to meet my future self and running from all of the things that would bring me closer to her, I sit, paralyzed by indecision. The river continues crashing just beneath my feet, a reminder that time ticks on, regardless of my actions. The fog, however, will not lift of its own volition. Waiting for the fog to pass isn’t an option because it never really will; the only way out of the fog is to continue trudging through it, no matter how many twists and turns my blind trudging creates in my bridge as it unfolds.
The events that currently loom in my future will eventually take up residence in my past, regardless of my efforts in either direction, to rush them or stave them off. I’ll soon move into my new house and it’ll feel like I never lived anywhere else. And then, eventually, I’ll outgrow it and find a new place to call home. Who knows how many times I’ll repeat the same pattern as time continues to meander by. Some day, humans who may not even exist yet will be trying on the jackets I wear today and marveling at the fact that they belonged to someone who was born in the 1900s. They’ll find my journal entries dated during the pandemic, struggle to read my handwriting, and try to imagine what life was like.
Day by day, each fleeting moment crawls further and further into my past until I’ve metamorphized into something wholly different from who I was. I look back at who I’ve been as though looking through a kaleidoscope, watching colorful remnants of myself tumble over one another. At the end of the bridge, I just have to hope that I like the way the colors crash into each other.
sunny side down
I did not get held up by the bridge today
the summer seems to have come all at once
I forgot what it was to sweat, to squint
I no longer remember
how it feels to be anywhere but here
I hate when the sun comes out
and I have to stop blaming the weather
for my bad mood
mom’s day poem
I have this disease where I forget
about every food that exists except pasta
I ate too much again
I know my limits and I love to push them
but never in the ways that I should
run with scissors
I’m so sick of self care why
do I have to do everything on my own?
isn’t there anyone else to take care of me?
someone to wash me and spoon feed me
and do all of the things that are too much
for my fragile constitution to manage
I’ve never been accused of talking much
and saying little
though maybe somebody should
Happy Friday the 13th! One of the most sacred days of the year, so important I named my cat after it. Celebrate with some witchcraft and maybe a bonfire.
Until next week —
happy friday the 13th to the queen. and happy every day to you, and your existentialism. you’re very cool, especially in double glasses