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.