Month: August 2017

I’m in love with a man who loves to take his time.

He isn’t slow, that’s not the thing, he just moves through time as if it’s this expansive, gooey, delicious, molasses-y thing. It’s really quite lovely.

And infuriating when it comes time to get somewhere.

Me, I dig luxuriating in stretchy seconds as much as the next gal, but when it comes time to do a thing, I immediately scrunch up my minutes and chop them into colored blocks and place them carefully in order, so that each block is snugly fit to the next and the next like perfectly cut stepping stones, which I proceed to stride over with brisk efficiency in a timely fashion.

Then I glance back and he is strumming away on a new tune or sharing a joke with our bodega friend and I am exasperated. And I am exasperated with myself for being exasperated. No one likes a Punctual Paula who lives her life following those two little clock hands as they inch their way to eternity! Come on you cool dreamy thing, that ain’t you!

It’s this weird battle in my being, this raging war between my Alice and my White Rabbit.

I used to heavily identify with Alice and in many ways I still do: constant bewilderment, insatiable fascination with people far more interesting than me, a baby face that has followed me into my mid-twenties and just won’t quit, a curiosity that has yet to kill the cat but hey, she’s got nine lives and it’s still early in the game.

But in the past few years, as Adulthood has seeped its way into my consciousness, it’s been feeding carrots to my inner White Rabbit, replacing “Eat Me” cakes and “Drink Me” questionable liquids with leafy greens and hearty vegetation and making the damn rabbit and his opinions on the nature of time grow bigger and stronger.

“No time to say hello, goodbye.”

No time. Isn’t that everyone’s greatest fear in one way or another? Running out of time? Running out of time before we find purpose, find love, vision, clarity, find the perfect damn cup of coffee? There’s so much call and need for motion, for going, for getting, that it can sneak up and paralyze you.  I wake in a sweat some nights, on that cusp of being unsure where I am but certainly sure that I’m running out of time. It’s a dark place to be, and the more I peer into the rabbit hole the deeper it becomes. I don’t like entering the places in myself that fear the loss of time, the places I enter with eyes glued to a clock that seems to go faster and faster as my feet grow slower and my voice feels fainter and I feel my face fading into dust and obscurity and Time becomes a cruel god, dangling my freedom close enough to make my mouth water but just a bit farther than an arm’s reach or a rabbit’s hop. Come the morning these images become bleached by the sun and a bit brighter and more bearable, but the feeling is still a ghost in my throat, a reminder of what the dark tells us when we remember our own mortality and gaze down the dark straight road to oblivion.

Of course some science and some mysticism suggest that time doesn’t move in a straight line at all. That point A does not lead to point B does not lead to point C, but all of the points are sort of jumbled together and dancing and becoming each other and doin’ their thing all at the same time. I wish we could feel it that way. I wish we could all bathe in time-mush-soup and create and destroy ourselves simultaneously on and on, and maybe somehow that’s what we are doing but our brains are just not sophisticated enough to register it. I know mine certainly isn’t.

But, I digress. Honestly I’m not even sure what I’m gress-ing about in the first place.

This is all probably to say in my meandering way that getting tense when time feels tight is probably a fruitless use of energy. Time’s gonna take us, so we ought to just take it right back. Alices and rabbits eventually end up the same place, so we may as well stop and talk to a few kings and bird-brains and wise sad turtles and painted roses on our way there. 

^Alice and the Rabbit. Dali made this.

“Haven’t seen you on this floor in a while”
The Shirt and Tie says to me with an absent, polite smile.
“Oh I’ve been–pretty busy” I say, stocking my umpteenth can of Diet Snapple into the company fridge.
What I wish I could say
What my heart says what my soul screams is:

“Since you saw me last, I said goodbye to my kids.
The little ones I taught for the past 5 months, the difficult ones, the brilliant ones, the ones who memorized their songs without prompting, the ones who peed their pants, the ones who banged their heads against the desks repeatedly to the rhythm of the Moana song they had sung so joyfully the week before in a fit frustration and unspoken rage. I left some with hugs and a few tears, I left others with very little ceremony at all.

Since you saw me last, I found myself in one of the most exciting theatrical projects of my life, a too-short reading in a room with Broadway giants, playing lovers with my real-life love, singing songs from my favorite era, songs my heart has been obsessed with since I can remember.

Since you saw me last I returned down south. I ran through green utopias with my mom and stepdad taking in the
intoxicating smell of homeland nature, I glided across waters with my dad and for a moment felt the freedom of a mind with no inner voice but the wind, I held my best friend’s child in my arms and saw the face of pure beauty and love and eyes of the most startling blue smiling back at me, I saw this friend as a mother for the first time and remembered her as The Bakers Wife in our school play and marveled at the synchronicity of life, I sat on a floor and giggled with my mother as we painted our nails and created our own adventure when the rain kept us inside.

Since you saw me last, I found myself in an artist heaven in Massachusetts, staying in a gorgeous farmhouse mansion filled to the brim with people of insane talent and inspiration, playing a role I’ve been working on on and off for the past 3 years in one of the most moving shows I’ve known, being cared for and fed by the sisters who the play is written about and for, hanging with the coolest dog I’ve met in quite a while. Breathing in green, breathing out music, being a part of a long evolution of a beautiful piece of art.

Since you saw me last, I retreated with my art partners to the most lovely Middle Of Nowhere place I know, incubating new songs, getting very serious and getting very silly, joining in a cinematic rave with just the 3 of us and approximately 3 million fireflies, building fires and dreaming and watching and falling under the spell of our fellow music makers beneath an impossibly open sky, each a unique voice with such important songs to sing.

Now I’m back. On your floor. I am your Temporary Kitchen Assistant. I take out the trash and I set out the food I make the coffee and I re-re-re-re-stock your sodas. A few minutes ago I got reprimanded (kindly and rightfully, I admit) for reading during lunch, a book about the character I played a few short weeks ago, because in the Real World in which I mostly feel like a visitor, occupying one’s mind while one is supposed to be doing the task one is getting paid to do is a no-no ( I’m instantly reminded of my friend’s job behind a drugstore counter, the self-described “petri-dish for madness”, it’s no easy task to demand a creator’s mind to be still.)

In the past month, Shirt and Tie, I have lived a thousand little lives in this cosmic nano-blink of time in the Goddess’s great green eye. I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing a year, a month, or a week from now, but chances are likely I’ll wind up on your floor again sometime. And if you should chance to press further, and ask that age-old baffling bastion of small talk question: “What have you been up to lately?” I’ll return your polite smile through all the emotion, the sadness, the excitement, the frustration, the hope, the immense overwhelmingness of sewing a life together, and reply in that most wicked and mysterious and complex understatement of my formative years: “Oh, this and that.”